Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 6.djvu/276

 226 NOTES AND QUERIES. [*-s. VL tor. 22, woa Japanese artist Hokusai, who has executed a picture of the autumnal maple leaves floating on the stream by causing a fowl, whose feet he dipped in red colour, to tread on paper brushed up in blue (Sekiba, 'Ukiyoe Hen- nenshi,' 1891, torn. ii. fol. 29 b); the corre- sponding similes familiarly seen in the Japanese and Chinese poesies being the comparison of the plum flowers and bamboo leaves respectively to a dog's steps and a fowl's. KUMAGUSU MlNAKATA. 1, Crescent Place, South Kensington, S.W. (To be continued.) " SHODDY " CLOTH BINDINGS.—I was lately in an old bookshop entirely devoted to the sale of second-hand one-snilling and two- shilling volumes—product of the last fifty years. No description could give an idea of the accumulated squalor and dilapidation thus presented. All was decay and dropping to pieces. Such as were — by a fiction — presumed to have been " bound in cloth" were in a strange putrescent state—eaten away as by disease. Those in cheap boards were all rotting; like beggars or tramps of the worst sort, they were all in rags; yet these were the showy, glittering things of not so many years ago, and the " spectacle gave to think. There was the result of the cheap and nasty work of our time—bad cloth, bad sewing, bad paper and print, all mean, cheap, and nasty. Not long since I spoke in these columns of the charming early editions of the Scott novels. Equally high artistic praise may be given to the class of books turned out some sixty years since. I am fond of collecting such, and often rescue one for a trifling ransom from box or outside shelf. There were really an elegance and a taste—and good—that command admiration. The designing and execution of the cloth cover was a different thing then. I have the ' Christmas Books' of Boz, fifty years old. yet the cloth is as sound as ever, unfaded, and the gilding rich and bright. Albert Smith's ' Trip to Constantinople' and some of Thackeray s works were truly elegant in design and exe- cution. The stamping on the side was most effective. How pretty to open them and come on the delicately wrought woodcuts by Harvey or Williams, inserted in the text or worked into a border! I know numbers of these dainty little volumes, where size and thick- ness was matter of nice calculation. For a really lovely specimen of decorative boards I would name Leigh Hunt's'Jar of Honey,' with its blue jar on a cream ground, on a glazed paper, which after forty or fifty years has remained unsoiled. Nowadays vile shoddy cloth, bad thread or wire, rotten paper, poor print, cannot furnish forth a decent book. They are no sooner put together than they begin to disintegrate. I would recommend every amateur, if ne can—though he will find no one in his way—to secure every one of these graceful little tomes on which he lights. No books give so much pleasure from their artistic character ; their qualities improve with keeping. PERCY FITZGERALD. SCOTT AND CARLYLE ON LAUGHTER. — Carlyle, in ' Sartor Resartus,' book i. chap, iv., says :— " No man whohasonco heartilyand wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad. How much lies in Laughter: the cipher-key wherewith we decipher the whole man! The man who cannot laugh is not only fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils ; but his whole life is already a treason and a stratagem." Scott does not seem to have altogether held this view. See the scene in 'Quentin Durward,' chap, xxxiii., where the unhappy "Rouge Sangher," i.e., Hayraddin Maugrabin, is hunted by " half a score of fierce boar- hounds " at Peronne. Louis XI. " laughed till the tears ran from his eyes, and in his ecstasies of rapture caught hold of the Duke's ermine cloak as if to support himself; whilst the Duke, no less delighted, flung his atm around the King's shoulder," Ac. Louis XL, I hope, was not " irreclaimably bad"—I trust no one is so—still he must have been bad enough, and yet, according to Scott, he seems_, like Justice Silence, to "have been merry twice and once." JONATHAN BOUCHIER. THE MISCHIEFS OF TOBACCO.—Every reader of ' N. & O.' will remember Cob's description of the smoker in ' Every Man in his Humour,' Act III. sc. ii., and how roguish tobacco is " good for nothing but to choke a man, and fill him,full of smoke and embers." Dr. Theodore Kerckring, of Amsterdam, in his 'Spicilegium Anatomicum,' 1670, relates how he dissected a subject who had been "beyond measure addicted to smoky delights"; and the description is highly graphic, fortifying that of Cob :— "Observatio XC.— Nimius Tabaci usus noxiui. Invaluit, heu ! nimium illud in Europ& Cacoethen, sugendi fumum herbte Tabaci, ut vocant, per tubos ad id solummodo confectos. Quanta inde morum pervereitas, ii viderint, quibus illud datum eat negotii, vel Politici, vel Tneplogi. Quantum sani- tati sure noceant, quibus hie mos est, ut toties Vulcano, vel Charon ti potius sacrificent, etiam non explicabo : suffeeerit oculis subjicere hominem, quern in Medicorum corona secui; is supra modum