If the best diaries known in literature have been written by men, the greater number have been the work of women. Even little girls, as we have seen, have taken kindly enough to the daily task of translating themselves into pages of pen and ink; but little boys have been wont to consider this a lamentable waste of time. It is true we have such painful and precocious records as that of young Nathaniel Mather, who happily died before reaching manhood, but not before he had scaled the heights of self-esteem, and sounded the depths of despair. When a boy, a real human boy, laments and bewails in his journal that he whittled a stick upon the Sabbath Day, “and, for fear of being seen, did it behind the door,--a great reproach of God, and a specimen of that atheism I brought into the world with me,”--we recognize the fearful possibilities of untempered sanctimony. Boyhood, thank Heaven, does not lend itself easily to introspection, and seldom finds leisure for remorse. As a rule, a lad commits himself to a diary, as to any other piece of work, only because it has been forced upon him by the voice of authority. It was the parental mandate, thinly disguised under parental counsel, which started young Dick Doyle on that delightful journal in which spirited sketches alternate with unregenerate adventures and mishaps. He begins it with palpable reluctance the first day of January, 1840; fears modestly that it “will turn out a hash;” hopes he may be “skinned alive by wildcats” if he fails to persevere with it; draws an animated picture of himself in a torn tunic running away from seven of these malignant animals that pursue him over tables and chairs; and finally settles down soberly and cheerfully to work. The entries grow longer and longer, the drawings more and more elaborate, as the diary proceeds. A great deal happened in 1840, and every event is chronicled with fidelity. The queen is married in the beginning of the year; a princess royal is born before its close. “Hurra! Hurra!” cries loyal Dick. Prince Louis Napoleon makes his famous descent upon Boulogne, and Dick sketches him sailing dismally away on a life-buoy. Above all, the young artist scores his first success, and the glory of having one of his drawings actually lithographed and sold is more than he can bear with sobriety. “Just imagine,” he writes, “if I was walking coolly along, and came upon the Tournament in a shop window. Oh, cricky! it would be enough to turn me inside out.” He survives this joyous ordeal, however, and toils gayly on until the year is almost up and the appointed task completed. On the 3d of December a serious-minded uncle invites him to go to Exeter Hall, an entertainment which the other children flatly and wisely decline. What he heard in that abode of dismal oratory we shall never know, for, stopping abruptly in the middle of a sentence,--“Uncle was going somewhere else first, and had started,”--Richard Doyle’s diary comes to an untimely end.