William Church Buss was a very skilful engraver, and his son, Robert William Buss, was trained by him, and was a clever engraver before he became a painter, and subsequently a well-known etcher on copper and steel, and draughtsman for wood-engravers. Working in this way, he illustrated the novels of Mrs. Trollope and Captain Marryat, and other writers, and two of the first etchings for “Pickwick” were his doing. For Charles Knight he illustrated “Chaucer,” helping also in the “Shakespeare,” “London,” and “Old England,” issued by that publisher. Many of his own original pictures were engraved and had wide sale, such as “Soliciting a Vote,” “The Musical Bore,” “Satisfaction,” “Time and Tide,” etc. And, with all this, he still found time for lectures on “The Beautiful and Picturesque,” on “Fresco,” and on “Comic Art”—this last re-written at the close of his life, and dedicated to his daughter, under the title of “Graphic Satire.” It was when on a visit to her paternal grandparents, in Newgate Street, that the future Educationalist made her first acquaintance with school-life, after a very quaint fashion, as she thus tells us— “To get me out of the way, my grandparents sent me to a little school in the city, on a first floor, with a few forms, and, as far as I remember, with no other appurtenances for a school at all. “The second school to which I went was kept by a Miss Cook—a mixed school of boys and girls. In Miss Cook’s school we sat on forms, and learned lessons which it never occurred to her to explain. I remember learning a good deal of ‘Murray’s Grammar.’” In Frances Power Cobbe’s “Autobiography” she tells us that the first practical result of her attainment of the arts of reading and writing—throwing a lurid light on the agonies of the process—was to inscribe on the gravel walk, in large letters, “Lessons, thou tyrant of the mind!” A similar inscription might have been engraven for the benefit of Miss Cook by Frances Mary Buss, after this prolonged course of Lindley Murray without explanation. But she seems to have found other solace. The tyranny of lessons was powerless to crush this independent young mind, or to repress an independence of action more suitable to the age of “Revolting Daughters,” than to that of “Mrs. Trimmer” or of “Evenings at Home.” Her next story tells how she invited a little companion to a juvenile party, which existed only in her own active imagination, until the kind mother gave it objective reality, on hearing of the small boy’s bitter disappointment. It might be at this school that Miss Buss acquired that ideal of “mixed schools” which she kept before her to the end, though she knew it was not to become fact in her day.