In size, it is what the booksellers call an 18mo; it is bound in green morocco, which from my earliest recollection has been spotted and tarnished with time; the corners are marked with triangular patches of red, like little cocked hats; and some unknown Goth has inflicted an incurable wound upon the back. There is no lettering outside; so that he who lounges past my humble shelves, seldom dreams of opening the anonymous little book in green. There it stands; day after day, week after week, year after year; and no one but myself regards it. But I make up for all neglects, with my own abounding love for it.
But let us open the volume.
What are these scrawls in the fly-leaves? what incorrigible pupil of a writing-master has been here? what crayon sketcher of wild animals and falling air-castles? Ah, no!—these are all part and parcel of the precious book, which go to make up the sum of its treasure to me.
Some of the scrawls are my own; and as poets do with their juvenile sonnets, I might write under this horse, “Drawn at the age of three years,” and under this autograph, “Executed at the age of eight.”
Others are the handiwork of my brothers, and sisters, and cousins; and the hands that sketched some of them are now moldered away.
But what does this anchor here? this ship? and this sea-ditty of Dibdin’s? The book must have fallen into the hands of some tarry captain of a forecastle. No: that anchor, ship, and Dibdin’s ditty are mine; this hand drew them; and on this very voyage to Liverpool. But not so fast; I did not mean to tell that yet.
Full in the midst of these pencil scrawlings, completely surrounded indeed, stands in indelible, though faded ink, and in my father’s hand-writing, the following:—
WALTER REDBURN.
Riddough’s Royal Hotel,
Liverpool, March 20th, 1808.
Turning over that leaf, I come upon some half-effaced miscellaneous memoranda in pencil, characteristic of a methodical mind, and therefore indubitably my father’s, which he must have made at various times during his stay in Liverpool. These are full of a strange, subdued, old, midsummer interest to me: and though, from the numerous effacements, it is much like cross-reading to make them out; yet, I must here copy a few at random:—