BOOKS FOR BAD BOYS.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."]
SIR,—I8 it worth while to tell your readers that their great- grandfathers had their "Bad Child's Books of Instruction" too ? I remember how, nearly eighty years ago, my father and mother shared with me the enjoyment of "The Good Boy's Soliloquy," which, under a thin veil of goodness, brought the arts of the pen and pencil to the instruction of bad boys in all kinds of mischief. Thus the poet wrote,—
" I must not naughty faces scrawl
With charcoal on a whitewashed wall,"
while the artist showed how the bad boy was doing the very thing which the good boy forbid himself. Another drawing suggested another piece of mischief, the more tempting fc.a- its danger :—
" I must not play with the tea-urn, Much less presume the cock to turn, Lest I should be the unlucky elf To flood the tray and scald myself."
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