d for illustrating the toy books, children's histories, etc., for
which this quaint old Oxfordshire town was famous. Many of them are
connected with the early printing and engraving carried on in this and
other towns of England. A quantity of the blocks were used in the books
printed by John White of York, who established himself, as before
mentioned, as a printer in Newcastle-on-Tyne, bringing with him a stock
of quaint old blocks formerly his father's [at York], where he was sole
printer to King William, for the five northern counties of England.

Boswell has recorded several conversations of Oliver Goldsmith with Dr.
Johnson, in which the warm-hearted poet expressed a wish, "to make
fishes, animals, birds, etc., _talk_, or appear so to do, for the
amusement and instruction of children." In the National Collection is
"The Valentine's Gift, or a Plan to enable children of all sizes and
denomination to behave with honour, integrity, and humanity, very
necessary to a trading nation: to which is added some account of Old
Zigzag, and of the Horn with which he used to understand the language of
birds, beasts, fishes and insects," etc., "Printed for Francis Power,
(grandson to the late Mr. J. Newbery) and Co., No. 65, St. Paul's
Churchyard, 1790, price sixpence, bound in gilt dutch paper binding, 105
and iii pages".

Numerous books were sold by Francis Power, No. 65, _near the Bar_, in
St. Paul's Churchyard, London; his list comprises "Giles Gingerbread,"
"Tom Thumb's Folio," "The London Cries, taken from the Life," "The
Lilliputian Auction," by Charley Chatter, "Nurse Truelove's Christmas
Box," "New Year's Gift," "The History of Little Goody Two Shoes," new
edition, "Adventures of a Bee," "The Little Lottery Book," "A Pretty
Plaything for Children," "The Lilliputian Magazine," "The Picture
Exhibition," "Lilliputian Masquerade," "Juvenile Trials for Robbing
Orchards and Telling Fibs," "Pretty Poems by Tommy Tagg, for children
three feet high," "A Pretty Book of Pictures, or Tommy Tripp's History,"
"The Drawing School by Master Angelo," "Poetical Flower Garden," "Tommy
Trapwit's Be Merry and Wise," "Lecture upon Toys," 2 vols; "Pretty Poems
for children six feet high," "The Museum," "Polite Academy," "Poetical
Flower Basket," "Mother Goose's Fairy Tales," "A Spelling Dictionary,
Rhetoric; Logic; Arithmetic; History; Chronology; Geography;" "Vicar of
Wakefield." Most of the latter except "Vicar" formed a circle of the
science