HOWITT'S "SKETCHES OF NATURAL HISTORY."
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] Sin,—In the Spectator of last week "E. M. W." quotes five stanzas of a poem of William Howitt's from Mary Howitt's i‘ Sketches of Natural History," 1834. The reference touched the springs of memory in me with a pathetic sort of pleasure, for the book (now on my table before me in its old green bind- ing) was one of the delights of my own childhood, some dozen years and onwards after its publication. As I open it in these later years it seems to me still, or rather more than ever, to be in its modest and most gentle way a book of genius, with a peculiar power of touching and stirring imagination and feeling. Not the least potent of its charms lies in the small wood engravings, characteristic of that pleasant age of books,— pictures which have far more of the poem in them than almost any I see now, with all our present luxuries of illustration. That time, if my own childish experience tells me at all true, was singularly rich in children's books of the very best sort,— books which delighted and animated, as well as informed, the child ; books perfectly unaffected, full of attraction without pretension, and withal written so well that the man finds them, when a few moments' leisure for such reading comes, more satisfying than ever to eyes and thought alike. Is the production of such books, so good for their first purpose, and so able to minister deeper pleasure sixty years later, quite a lost art P—I am, Sir, &c., HA.NDLEY DITNELM. Auckland Castle, Bishop Auckland.
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