as so dull to colour. England, the
hedgerow elms, the thin brick houses, windmills, glimpses of the
navigable Thames--England, when at last I came to visit it, was only
Skelt made evident: to cross the border was, for the Scotsman, to come
home to Skelt; there was the inn-sign and there the horse-trough, all
foreshadowed in the faithful Skelt. If, at the ripe age of fourteen
years, I bought a certain cudgel, got a friend to load it, and
thenceforward walked the tame ways of the earth my own ideal, radiating
pure romance--still I was but a puppet in the hand of Skelt; the
original of that regretted bludgeon, and surely the antitype of all the
bludgeon kind, greatly improved from Cruikshank, had adorned the hand of
Jonathan Wild, pl. 1. "This is mastering me," as Whitman cries, upon
some lesser provocation. What am I? what are life, art, letters, the
world, but what my Skelt has made them? He stamped himself upon my
immaturity. The world was plain before I knew him, a poor penny world;
but soon it was all coloured with romance. If I go to the theatre to see
a good old melodrama, 'tis but Skelt a little faded. If I visit a bold
scene in nature, Skelt would have been bolder; there had been certainly
a castle on that mountain, and the hollow tree--that set-piece--I seem
to miss it in the foreground. Indeed, out of this cut-and-dry, dull,
swaggering, obtrusive and infantile art, I seem to have learned the very
spirit of my life's enjoyment; met there the shadows of the characters I
was to read about and love in a late future; got the romance of _Der
Freischuetz_ long ere I was to hear of Weber or the mighty Formes;
acquired a gallery of scenes and characters with which, in the silent
theatre of the brain, I might enact all novels and romances; and took
from these rude cuts an enduring and transforming pleasure. Reader--and
yourself?

A word of moral: it appears that B. Pollock, late J. Redington, No. 73
Hoxton Street, not only publishes twenty-three of these old stage
favourites, but owns the necessary plates and displays a modest
readiness to issue other thirty-three. If you love art, folly, or the
bright eyes of children, speed to Pollock's or to Clarke's of Garrick
Street. In Pollock's list of publicanda I perceive a pair of my ancient
aspirations: _The Wreck Ashore_ and _Sixteen-String Jack_; and I cherish
the belief that when these shall see once more the light of day, B.
Pollock will remember this apologist. But, indeed