the usual satisfactory licking. Fabius, Hasdrubal -- all alike were
pallid shades with faint, thin voices powerless to pierce the
distance. The margins of Cocytus doubtless knew them: mine were
dedicated to the more attractive flesh and blood of animal life, the
varied phases of the tropic forest. Or, in more practical mood, I
would stoop to render certain facts recorded in the text. To these
digressions I probably owe what little education I possess. For
example, there was one sentence in our Roman history: ``By this single
battle of Magnesia, Antiochus the Great lost all his conquests in Asia
Minor.'' Serious historians really should not thus forget themselves.
'Twas so easy, by a touch of the pen, to transform ``battle'' into
``bottle''; for ``conquests'' one could substitute a word for which
not even Macaulay's school-boy were at a loss; and the result,
depicted with rude vigour in his margin, fixed the name of at least
one ancient fight on the illustrator's memory. But this plodding and
material art had small charm for me: to whom the happy margin was a
``clear sky'' ever through which I could sail away at will to more
gracious worlds. I was duly qualified by a painfully acquired
ignorance of dead languages cautiously to approach my own; and 'twas
no better. Along Milton's margins the Gryphon must needs pursue the
Arimaspian -- what a chance, that Arimaspian, for the imaginative
pencil! And so it has come about that, while Milton periods are mostly
effaced from memory by the sponge of Time, I can still see that
vengeful Gryphon, cousin-german to the gentle beast that danced the
Lobster Quadrille by a certain shore.

It is by no means insisted upon that the chief end and use of margins
is for pictorial illustration, nor yet for furtive games of oughts and
crosses, nor (in the case of hymn-books) for amorous missives scrawled
against the canticle for the day, to be passed over into an adjacent