y were then; but we doubt whether we did not prefer the little old
"Miniature Library Nights" with frontispieces by Uwins; for THESE books
the pictures don't count. Every boy of imagination does his own pictures
to Scott and the "Arabian Nights" best.

Of funny pictures there were none especially intended for us children.
There was Rowlandson's "Doctor Syntax": Doctor Syntax in a fuzz-wig, on
a horse with legs like sausages, riding races, making love, frolicking
with rosy exuberant damsels. Those pictures were very funny, and that
aquatinting and the gay-colored plates very pleasant to witness; but if
we could not read the poem in those days, could we digest it in this?
Nevertheless, apart from the text which we could not master, we remember
Doctor Syntax pleasantly, like those cheerful painted hieroglyphics in
the Nineveh Court at Sydenham. What matter for the arrow-head, illegible
stuff? give us the placid grinning kings, twanging their jolly bows over
their rident horses, wounding those good-humored enemies, who tumble
gayly off the towers, or drown, smiling, in the dimpling waters, amidst
the anerithmon gelasma of the fish.

After Doctor Syntax, the apparition of Corinthian Tom, Jerry Hawthorn,
and the facetious Bob Logic must be recorded--a wondrous history indeed
theirs was! When the future student of our manners comes to look over
the pictures and the writing of these queer volumes, what will he think
of our society, customs, and language in the consulship of Plancus?
"Corinthian," it appears, was the phrase applied to men of fashion
and ton in Plancus's time: they were the brilliant predecessors of the
"swell" of the present period--brilliant, but somewhat barbarous, it
must be confessed. The Corinthians were in the habit of drinking a great
deal too much in Tom Cribb's parlor: they used to go and see "life" in
the gin-shops; of nights, walking home (as well as they could), they
used to knock down "Charleys," poor harmless old watchmen with lanterns,
guardians of the streets of Rome, Planco Consule. They perpetrated a
vast deal of boxing; they put on the "mufflers" in Jackson's rooms;
they "sported their prads" in the Ring in the Park; they attended
cock-fights, and were enlightened patrons of dogs and destroyers of
rats. Besides these sports, the delassemens of gentlemen mixing with the
people, our patricians, of course, occasionally enjoyed the society of
their own class. What a wonderful picture that used to