V. PARNASSUS AND PLYNLIMMON 91

102. At Messrs. Smith & Elder’s he was an admittedly exemplary apprentice, rapidly becoming a serviceable shopman, taking orders intelligently, and knowing well both his books and his customers. As all right-minded apprentices and good shopmen do, he took personal pride in everything produced by the firm; and on Sundays always brought a volume or two in his pocket to show us the character of its most ambitious publications; especially choosing, on my behalf, any which chanced to contain good engravings. In this way I became familiar with Stanfield and Harding long before I possessed a single engraving myself from either of them; but the really most precious, and continuous in deep effect upon me, of all gifts to my childhood, was from my Croydon aunt, of the Forget-me-not of 1827, with a beautiful engraving in it of Prout’s “Sepulchral monument at Verona.”¹

Strange, that the true first impulse to the most refined instincts of my mind should have been given by my totally uneducated, but entirely good and right-minded, mother’s sister.

103. But more magnificent results came of Charles’s literary connection, through the interest we all took in the embossed and gilded small octavo which Smith & Elder published annually, by title Friendship’s Offering. This was edited by a pious Scotch missionary, and minor-very much minor-key, poet, Thomas Pringle; mentioned once or twice with a sprinkling of honour in Lockhart’s Life of Scott.² A strictly conscientious and earnest, accurately trained, though narrowly learned, man, with all the Scottish conceit, restlessness for travel, and petulant courage of the Parks³ and Livingstones; with also some pretty tinges of romance and inklings of philosophy to mellow him, he was

¹ [See below, § 162 (p. 140).]

² [For another mention of Pringle (1789-1834), see Vol. XXXIV. p. 96. The mentions of him in Lockhart are at vol. iv. p. 64, and vol. vi. p. 363 (ed. 1). At the latter place, Lockhart gives a brief account of him, referring for fuller particulars to the Quarterly Review for December 1835.]

³ [For Mungo Park, see Fors Clavigera, Letters 92 and 95 (Vol. XXIX. pp. 452, 513).]

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