gentle words, and the curse of selfishness; | for believing the profound truth that good without a sentence of moral or preaching, after all is stronger than evil, in spite of all or even the mention of a pet text. And the world may say, though one learn it no less so with 'Jack the Giant-killer," or from a romance, and the other from the any other such atrociously false book. exploits of a hero who never lived. Jack shows perseverance, pluck, skill, and justice. He cuts off the heads of those who ought to be headless; he breaks open the tyrant's castle, and sets the prisoners free; he takes up the cause of the oppressed; beautiful ladies regain their husbands, brave knights rejoin their king and country. After all, this seems to be the spirit in the men who, by God's blessing, fight nobly, toil faithfully, and die bravely for old England wherever the sun shines:

And what,' says Tom Brown, 'would life be without fighting, I should like to know? From the cradle to the grave, fighting rightly understood is the business the real, highest, honestest business of every son of man. Every one who is worth his salt has his enemies who must be beaten; evil thoughts or habits in himself, or spiritual wickedness in high places; Russians or Border Ruffians, Bill, Tom, or Harry, who will not let him live his life in quiet till he has thrashed them.'*

What can be better, wiser, or fairer? A good fairy story takes up the cause of right against wrong, of good against evil. Step by step the difficulties increase, a web of danger and perplexity is woven round the

But, if wrong and injustice triumph in a story to the very end, children are wretched; not at the mere deaths, miseries, or murders, but at punishment falling on the wrong head. Their moral sense is injured. The conscience of a child, taught fairly to love what is pure, brave, and true, is tenderly alive to a sense of every injustice as a departure from his own high standard. By and bye, when he is older, and wise enough to believe in spirit-rapping and to disbelieve in Moses, as the world begins to get hold of him, he will see more than enough of wrong triumphing over right, and falsehood over truth. Meanwhile, a tender conscience is his choicest inheritance; and as the world of fiction, as well as of Nature, opens to him her golden realms of delight by fairy wells and shining gardens, talking fishes and enchanted castles, his imagination and fancy carry him away in a moment from all the little miseries of schoolboy-life, and give to him a domain of his own in which he can wander, and which he can rule, at his own sweet will. There is, too, a divine principle of leisure. Life is not altogether a pursuit; there are golden hours in it, when we may feed the mind in a wise passive

The grass hath time to grow in meadow
lands,

And leisurely the opal, murmuring sca
Breaks on its yellow sands.' †

hero;
but he bravely and boldly perseveres,
hunts out and defies the giants, out-ness:
manœuvres the dwarfs and at last tri-
umphs, just when his enemies fancy it is all
up with him; or, at the very agony of the
crisis, in steps the fairy, and with one touch
of her wand sets all right in a trice. The
boy who sits and reads this by the winter-
fire rejoices when he comes to this righteous
termination of affairs. In his eyes the
giant who has murdered so many brave
knights, or poor peasants, deserved to be
hanged; so did the dwarf, being twenty
times more malicious and full of craft than
Blunderbore himself. In short,

The child is father of the man,'

6

It is a poet, as well as a brave knight, who says, The dealer in fiction cometh unto you with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimneycorner; and pretending no more, doth intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue, even as the child is often brought to take most wholesome things by hiding them in such as have a pleasant taste; which, if one tell them the nature of the aloes and the rhubarbarum they should

and, at eight years old, over 'Jack the Giant-killer' feels the same sort of satisfaction as his father who reads Ivanhoe, and rejoices when the great hulking tyrant Front de Boeuf is roasted in the flames of his own castle. Justice has been outraged, but is vindicated; and the rough dentistry practised on Isaac of York is fairly re-ters and papers from Ejuxria; then came his torvenged. Neither boy nor man is the worse

* P. 238.

* Among a host of other remarkable men who thus rejoiced in a little world of their own was Hartley Coleridge. Hartley Coleridge,' says De Quincey, had a kingdom which he governed for many years; well or ill, I can't say. My own king. dom was an island, called Gombroon. Derwent,'

used Hartley to say to his brother, I have had let

rent of words in a resistless stream,' &c. - Memoir of H. Coleridge, p. xxxix.

t Fraser.'

'Pray to God devoutly,
Hammer away stoutly.'

receive, they would sooner take their physic | country lane, gets his wheels deep down into at their ears than at their mouth."* Our the mire, and there sticks fast. The boy general position, then, is that there is a reads it, and at once sees the curse of sloth, fair, wise moral lying hidden in sound, the blessing of work; if you want help from a healthy fiction, which all may read who will. higher power put your own shoulder to the It may not always lie on the surface; yet wheel; and don't lie there in the mud always near enough to be apparent in a howling to Jupiter.* God helps those who good, natural story, allegory, or fable. strive to help themselves; or as the Spanish Facts should disclose their own virtues. proverb has it, He who is able to benefit by a lesson will, no doubt, discover it under any husk, before it is stripped, and laid bare to the kernel. Too much teaching hardens the heart.'† The youngest reader who has Or, suppose we wish to teach that every any brains and takes an interest in what he one had better be content in his own place, reads -as every child does who is kindly-cuique suum; what can tell it to a child taught-gets hold of the moral for him- more lightly and pleasantly than the folself without having it preached into him, lowing?and without even a reflection tagged on as an antidote to the fiction. He takes in altogether, the seed and the soil in which it grows; by and bye, in due season, the dainty seed will spring apace into leaf, blossom, and golden fruit.

To take an example, what can be better than such a fable as The Wind and the Sun,' told simply as Mr. James tells it, to teach a child that Persuasion is stronger than Force

'A dispute once rose between the wind and the sun which was the stronger of the two, and it was agreed that whichever soonest made a traveller take off his cloak, should be accounted the more powerful. The Wind began, and blew with all his might and main a blast, cold and fierce as a Thracian storm. But the stronger he blew, the closer the traveller wrapped his cloak about him, and the tighter he held it. Then broke out the Sun, with welcome beams driving away the vapour and the cold. The traveller felt the pleasant warmth, and as the Sun shone brighter and brighter, he sat down, overcome with the heat, and cast his cloak on the ground. Thus the sun gained the day. Sunshine is stronger than blustering force.'

So, also, with the well-known fable The Miller, his Son, and the Ass; we see in a moment the folly of trying to please everybody, and having no will of our own. First the man then the boy, then neither, then both riding; then the ass strung to a pole on the shoulders of those who should have ridden him, toppling headlong into the river. Endeavouring to please everybody he pleased no one, and lost his ass into the bargain. So again, with 'Jupiter and the Waggoner,' who, driving his horses idly along a

'The Mountain and the Squirrel
Had a quarrel;

And the Mountain called the Squirrel a little
Prig.

"Bun" replied,

You are doubtless very big;

But all sorts of things and weather
Must be taken together
To make up a year,
And a sphere.

And I think it no disgrace
To occupy my place.
If I'm not so large as you,
You are not so small as I,
And not half so spry.

I'll not deny you really make

A very pretty squirrel track;
Talents differ; all is wisely put;
If I cannot carry forests on my back,
Neither can you crack a nut.
Let both be content
With what is sent.'

A

Even such an outrageous story as Bluebeard' has its meaning and its use. young lady is goose enough to marry an old man with a blue beard, who had already had half a dozen wives, and got rid of them in a very queer way. But she determines to marry him and become Mrs. Bluebeard. She duly promises to honour and obey him; but soon breaks her word, peeps into the forbidden chamber of horrors, and then tells a lie to hide her guilt. The end of it is that desperate scene on the tower with Sister Anne, from which she barely escapes with her life. Bluebeard is an old monster, no doubt, for chopping off the heads of his six wives, and well deserved being cut to

*I will never despair,' says Feltham, 'because I have a God; I will never presume, because I am but a man.'

pieces by Mrs. Bluebeard's infuriated bro- | dragged the man up the chimney by the rope. thers; but how could one better show the There he stuck, while poor Colly hung danger and folly of that meddling, itching swinging half way down the wall.

the fable is unusually simple, he rises in ex-dogs' ears in his books, and finally became. plaining it to a height of pompous gravity a great man and rode in his own carriage. which rivals Mr. Bumble himself; as in the H. was the very reverse of all this; being case of The Two Pots,' on which he idle and saucy, loving dogs' ears, naughty launches out into a whole page of pathos, books, and bad boys who climbed trees and beginning with The interpreters of these fell into muddy ditches; he ran away from fables deduce from this narrative a caution school with Master W. Wilful, fell into the against incongruous and unequal friend- hands of the gipsies, and was nearly starved ships made between men widely separated in the woods; but finally was saved from from each other by wealth and station,' &c. beggary by Mr. Careful, who met him one Few boys would ever read such wordy rhodo- day in rags near the Exchange in Lonmontade as this, and fewer still would relish don.' The whole book is written in a pomor understand it. The one element of pousSandford and Merton' sort of style, wearisomeness is fatal to its usefulness which few children would willingly read, among young people. 'Reading,' says and none be the better for if they did. Steele, should be to the mind what exer- The final sentence at page 63 will suffice as cise is to the body, bringing pleasure with a specimen: From this little history our health and strength. The virtue we gather young readers will see the necessity of from a fable is like the health we get by being good, obeying their parents and hunting; the pursuit that draws us on with friends, minding their learning, being caupleasure, makes us insensible of the fatigues tious in their actions, and never apt to do that accompany it.' We sadly fear that things of their heads (sic), when they have no one who travels into the land of Esop the opportunity of consulting their elders.' with Mr. Townsend will ever be beguiled The good and bad boy are both equally iminto forgetting the pains of the journey. possible, and on the whole we take Master Nor, indeed, will he fare much better under Charles Careful to be the more disagreeable the learned guidance of Archdeacon Crox- of the two. Such a mixture of precociousall himself, whose work appears to us to be ness and cant would be simply intolerable in indifferent taste and little suited to the in real life, and no child would ever believe youthful reader. But Mr. James has left in his existence. The companion volume us nothing to desire in a child's Esop's Fa- is of a totally different kind, equally curious bles, and his book will charm many a young in its way, and far more likely to have been reader, not less with the simple clearness of read by the little gentlemen and ladies for the text, than the beauty of its illustrations. whose benefit (says Mr. Harris) I have at a While speaking of illustrations we stop great expense got together the largest assortfor a moment to glance at two quaint, odd, ment of instructive and entertaining little little three-penny books, in 24mo., paper books of any other person whomsoever." It is covers, having on the title-page the name called Robin Goodfellow, A Fairy Tale, of J. Harris, 1815.' They were written ex- written by a Fairy for the entertainment of pressly for the young people of fifty years all the pretty little Faies and Faires in ago, and both are types of a distinct class Great Britain and Ireland.' The whole of fiction. The first is entitled Virtue and thing is so curious, as a child's book, that Vice; or the History of Charles Careful we must endeavour to give our readers and Harry Heedless; showing how the one- some notion of its contents. Fairy Land came to utter beggary and shame, and the other to be a great man;' illustrated with cuts, which must be seen to be thoroughly enjoyed.

Charley and Harry are, respectively, the model Good and Bad Boys. Both are the sons of gentlemen, and brought up in the same way; C. being radically good, and H. radically bad. C. loved to imitate his elders, and to ask their advice; he never climbed trees in quest of birds' nests, never wasted his pocket-money, read none but good books, gave crowns away to beggars, never made mud pies, or fell into muddy • ditches, sat silent till spoken to, never made

* 'Tatler,' 147.

exists in the air at a distance of about five feet from this earth,' and is the land of all beautiful and perfect things. Fancy is the king of it, Whim his royal consort, and Imagination their eldest son.

Whenever any poor mortal 'can so far divest himself of the gross incumbrance of human nature as to visit these sublime regions' he is met with a hearty welcome, and charmed with all he sees; but, unfortunately, there is a lumbering, heavy fellow, named Stupidity, who presides over the birth of the greater number of mankind, and so strangely benumbs the faculties of their minds that their whole lives are spent in eating, drinking, and sleeping.' The writer of the little book, however, is