“Mr. Dixon, the celebrated Californian Penman, as he appears at Mr. Stokes’s lectures, illustrating Memory as applied to Fine Art Penmanship, and executing beautiful specimens while keeping time to music!” From Stokes’s Rapid Drawing; for Rapidly Teaching to Draw, and for Teaching to Draw Rapidly, 1879, by William Stokes, Teacher of Memory. —Mr. Stokes taught memory by means of rhyme, among other techniques, and one cannot help admiring the way he has condensed the substance of every preface into two lines:

PREFACE.

The Public asked, and I obeyed,
And that is why this Book was made.

In the third edition, he added a new preface, which similarly condenses the substance of every preface to a third edition of any book ever written:

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.

By this Edition you may tell
The Public liked the others well!