a little black boy. Then, too, the
subjects of recitation were ill chosen. We are attempting to introduce a
great nation to a knowledge of the richest and noblest literature in
the world. The society of Calcutta assemble to see what progress we are
making; and we produce as a sample a boy who repeats some blackguard
doggerel of George Colman's, about a fat gentleman who was put to bed
over an oven, and about a man-midwife who was called out of his bed by
a drunken man at night. Our disciple tries to hiccup, and tumbles and
staggers about in imitation of the tipsy English sailors whom he has
seen at the punch houses. Really, if we can find nothing better worth
reciting than this trash, we had better give up English instruction
altogether."

"As to the list of prize books, I am not much better satisfied. It
is absolutely unintelligible to me why Pope's Works and my old friend
Moore's Lalla Rookh should be selected from the whole mass of English
poetry to be prize books. I will engage to frame, currente calamo, a
better list. Bacon's Essays, Hume's England, Gibbon's Rome, Robertson's
Charles V., Robertson's Scotland, Robertson's America, Swift's Gulliver,
Robinson Crusoe, Shakespeare's Works, Paradise Lost, Milton's smaller
poems, Arabian Nights, Park's Travels, Anson's Voyage, the Vicar of
Wakefield, Johnson's Lives, Gil Blas, Voltaire's Charles XII., Southey's
Nelson, Middleton's Life of Cicero.

"This may serve as a specimen. These are books which will amuse and
interest those who obtain them. To give a boy Abercrombie on the
Intellectual Powers, Dick's Moral Improvement, Young's Intellectual
Philosophy, Chalmers's Poetical Economy!!! (in passing I may be allowed
to ask what that means?) is quite absurd. I would not give orders at
random for books about which we know nothing. We are under no necessity
of ordering at haphazard. We know Robinson Crusoe, and Gulliver, and
the Arabian Nights, and Anson's Voyage, and many other delightful works
which interest even the very young, and which do not lose their interest
to the end of our lives. Why should we order blindfold such books as
Markham's New Children's Friend, the juvenile Scrap Book, the Child's
Own Book, Niggens's Earth, Mudie's Sea, and somebody else's Fire and
Air?--books which, I will be bound for it, none of us ever opened.

"The list ought in all its parts to be thoroughly recast. If Sir
Benjamin Malkin will furnish the names of ten or twelve works of a
scie