Marginalia

American Hunt, in his suggestive ''Talks about Art,'' demands that the
child shall be encouraged -- or rather permitted, for the natural
child needs little encouragement -- to draw when- and whereon-soever
he can; for, says he, the child's scribbling on the margin of his
school-books is really worth more to him than all he gets out of them,
and indeed, ''to him the margin is the best part of all books, and he
finds in it the soothing influence of a clear sky in a landscape.''
Doubtless Sir Benjamin Backbite, though his was not an artist soul,
had some dim feeling of this mighty truth when he spoke of that new
quarto of his, in which ''a neat rivulet of text shall meander through
a meadow of margin'': boldly granting the margin to be of superior
importance to the print. This metaphor is pleasantly expanded in
Burton's ''Bookhunter'': wherein you read of certain folios with
''their majestic stream of central print overflowing into rivulets of
marginal notes, sedgy with citations.'' But the good Doctor leaves the
main stream for a backwater of error in inferring that the chief use
of margins is to be a parading-ground for notes and citations. As if
they had not absolute value in themselves, nor served a finer end! In
truth, Hunt's child was vastly the wiser man.

For myself, my own early margins chiefly served to note, cite, and
illustrate the habits of crocodiles. Along the lower or ''tail'' edge,
the saurian, splendidly serrated as to his back, arose out of old
Nile; up one side negroes, swart as sucked lead-pencil could limn
them, let fall their nerveless spears; up the other, monkeys,
gibbering with terror, swarmed hastily up palm-trees -- a plant to the
untutored hand of easier outline than (say) your British oak.
Meanwhile, all over the unregarded text Balbus slew Caius on the most
inadequate provocation, or Hannibal pursued his victorious career,
while Roman generals delivered ornate set speeches prior to receiving
the usual satisfactory licking. Fabius, Hasdrubal -- all alike were
pallid shades with faint, thin voices powerless to pierce the
distance. The margins of Cocytus doubtless knew them: mine were
dedicated to the more attractive flesh and blood of animal life, the
varied phases of the tropic forest. Or, in more practical mood, I
would stoop to render certain facts recorded in the text. To these
digressions I probably owe what little education I possess. For
example, there was one sentence in our Roman history: ''By this single
battle of Magnesia, Antiochus the Great lost all his conquests in Asia
Minor.'' Serious historians really should not thus forget themselves.
'Twas so easy, by a touch of the pen, to transform ''battle'' into
''bottle''; for ''conquests'' one could substitute a word for