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 which not even Macaulay’s school-boy were at a loss; and the result, depicted with rude vigour in his margin, fixed the name of at least one ancient fight on the illustrator’s memory.  But this plodding and material art had small charm for me:  to whom the happy margin was a ``clear sky’’ ever through which I could sail away at will to more gracious worlds.  I was duly qualified by a painfully acquired ignorance of dead languages cautiously to approach my own; and ’twas no better.  Along Milton’s margins the Gryphon must needs pursue the Arimaspian —­ what a chance, that Arimaspian, for the imaginative pencil!  And so it has come about that, while Milton periods are mostly effaced from memory by the sponge of Time, I can still see that vengeful Gryphon, cousin-german to the gentle beast that danced the Lobster Quadrille by a certain shore.

It is by no means insisted upon that the chief end and use of margins is for pictorial illustration, nor yet for furtive games of oughts and crosses, nor (in the case of hymn-books) for amorous missives scrawled against the canticle for the day, to be passed over into an adjacent pew:  as used, alas! to happen in days when one was young and godless, and went to church.  Nor, again, are the margins of certain poets entrusted to man for the composing thereon of infinitely superior rhymes on the subjects themselves have maltreated:  a depraved habit, akin to scalping.  What has never been properly recognised is the absolute value of the margin itself —­ a value frequently