Johnny Robinson : the Story of the Childhood and Schooldays
of an "intelligent Artisan." By "The Journeyman Engineer." 2 vols. (Tinsley.)—This book is certainly good fun ; but it is very little more. The "Intelligent Artizan " was sent at four years old to a dame's school, and at eight to the borough school of his native town, where he stayed till he was old enough to be apprenticed. Now these are exactly the sort of places of which we hoar a great deal from observers who stand without, but very little from those who have had the opportunity of see- ing them from within. It is disappointing that our author, who has a certain knack of using his pen, should tell us so little. The fact is that he writes like a thorough schoolboy. There is plenty about his play, life, about his loves and wars, about collisions with authorities and feuds with neighbours ; there are, in particular, some quite Homeric descriptions of fights ; but about the school-life there is next to nothing. Of what he learnt, or of what he was meant to learn, we can get no idea. The general impression left upon us is that for thorough-going idleness Eton itself could not match a "borough school," at least as it was in the "Artizan's " youthful days. There was a " hard-reading" set, it was true, but the "hard reading" meant nothing but a constant admiration for the better works of fiction. To real hard work, to the bracing up of the mind to difficult intellectual effort, there is not an allusion. But the book is very good reading notwithstanding. Boy life in a region of which we know very little is painted with vigorous strokes.
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