ALKEN'S ILLUSTRATIONS. 



in comparison with Aiken's original water-colour 

 drawings, and the present publishers have felt that 

 the above-mentioned pair of plates are uninteresting 

 and spiritless, as lacking the strikingly noteworthy 

 characteristics of the Aiken series reproduced in the 

 present edition. The two Rawlins designs were 

 probably merely slight suggestions offered to be 

 worked out by Aiken's hand, and as these sketches 

 have not been preserved with the interesting original 

 S7iite of highly finished water-colour pictures (which 

 became the property of Ackermann in 1835-7), they 

 are accordingly excluded from the present series of 

 facsimiles after Aiken ; but it is supplemented by a 

 further subject representing one of Mytton's wildest 

 equestrian escapades, putting his horse at a leap 

 down a bank "high as a house." This capital draw- 

 ing, hitherto unpublished, was evidently designed for 

 the illustration of the first issue. 



It may be of interest to notify alterations and 

 modifications as collated from a comparison of the 

 original drawings, herein reproduced, with the twelve 

 plates of the 1835 first edition, and the eighteen plates 

 of the second edition as published in 1837. 



The frontispiece to the earliest edition was " ' The 

 Meet,' with Lord Derby's staghounds," applying to 



