I yield to none in my love of bookstall urbanity. I have spent as happy
moments over the stalls (until the woman looked out) as any literary
apprentice boy who ought to be moving onwards. But I confess my weakness
in liking to see some of my favourite purchases neatly bound. The books
I like to have about me most are Spenser, Chaucer, the minor poems of
Milton, the _Arabian Nights_, Theocritus, Ariosto, and such old
good-natured speculations as Plutarch's _Morals_. For most of these I
like a plain good old binding, never mind how old, provided it wears
well; but my _Arabian Nights_ may be bound in as fine and flowery a
style as possible, and I should love an engraving to every dozen pages.
Book-prints of all sorts, bad and good, take with me as much as when I
was a child: and I think some books, such as Prior's _Poems_, ought
always to have portraits of the authors. Prior's airy face with his cap
on, is like having his company. From early association, no edition of
Milton pleases me so much, as that in which there are pictures of the
Devil with brute ears, dressed like a Roman General: nor of Bunyan, as
the one containing the print of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, with
the Devil whispering in Christian's ear, or old Pope by the wayside, and
Vanity Fair,
With the Pilgrims suffering there.
I delight in the recollection of the puzzle I used to have with the
frontispiece of the _Tale of a Tub_, of my real horror at the sight of
that crawling old man representing Avarice, at the beginning of
_Enfield's Speaker_, the _Looking Glass_, or some such book; and even of
the careless schoolboy hats, and the prim stomachers and cottage
bonnets, of such golden-age antiquities as the _Village School_. The
oldest and most worn-out woodcut, representing King Pippin, Goody Two
Shoes, or the grim Soldan, sitting with three staring blots for his eyes
and mouth, his sceptre in one hand, and his other five fingers raised
and spread in admiration at the feats of the Gallant London Prentice,
cannot excite in me a feeling of ingratitude.--J. H. LEIGH HUNT. _My
Books._