hild's book, of not less interest
than even the Iliad, which might, I was told, be read on Sabbaths, in a
magnificent old edition of the "Pilgrim's Progress," printed on coarse
whity-brown paper, and charged with numerous woodcuts, each of which
occupied an entire page, that, on principles of economy, bore
letter-press on the other side. And such delightful prints as these
were! It must have been some such volume that sat for its portrait to
Wordsworth, and which he so exquisitely describes as

"Profuse in garniture of wooden cuts,
Strange and uncouth; dire faces, figures dire,
Sharp-knee'd, sharp elbow'd, and lean-ankled too,
With long and ghastly shanks,--forms which, once seen,
Could never be forgotten."

In process of time I had devoured, besides these genial works Robinson
Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, Ambrose on Angels, the "judgment chapter" in
Howie's Scotch Worthies, Byron's Narrative, and the Adventures of Philip
Quarll, with a good many other adventures and voyages, real and
fictitious, part of a very miscellaneous collection of books made by my
father. It was a melancholy little library to which I had fallen heir.
Most of the missing volumes had been with the master aboard his vessel
when he perished. Of an early edition of Cook's Voyages, all the volumes
were now absent save the first; and a very tantalizing romance, in four
volumes,--Mrs. Ratcliff's "Mysteries of Udolpho," was represented by
only the earlier two. Small as the collection was, it contained some
rare books,--among the rest, a curious little volume, entitled "The
Miracles of Nature and Art," to which we find Dr. Johnson referring, in
one of the dialogues chronicled by Boswell, as scarce even in his day,
and which had been published, he said, some time in the seventeenth
century by a bookseller whose shop hung perched on Old London Bridge,
between sky and water. It contained, too, the only copy I ever saw of
the "Memoirs of a Protestant condemned to the Galleys of France for his
Religion,"--a work interesting from the circumstance that--though it
bore another name on its title-page--it had been translated from the
French for a few guineas by poor Goldsmith, in his days of obscure
literary drudgery, and exhibited the peculiar excellencies of his style.
The collection boasted, besides, of a curious old book, illustrated by
very uncouth plates, that detailed the perils and sufferings of an
English sailor who had spent his b