It is pleasant, therefore, to turn to a third process of dealing with a child's mind, though only in print, as something-not radically vicious or bad-but waiting to be drawn out into simple, healthy, happy life; to drink in air, sunshine, vigour, cold, or heat, each in their degree, from all around it; to meet good and evil as things that must be met, to be natural as God meant it to be, and to be dieted on wholesome food. Now, the food of a child's mind must be fiction as well as fact. The mind of a child,' says a wise thinker, 'is like the acorn; its powers are folded up, they do not yet appear, but they are all there. The memory, the judgment, the invention, the feeling of right and wrong, are all in his mind, even of an infant just born. One by one they awake.' His imagination-one of the earliest powers that awakens within him, even before he has passed through the mysteries of pap and found out that being naughty differs from being good-must be fed. And fed it will be; either on the make-believe talk of his sister Mary nursing her doll, the idle stories of Betsey the Nursemaid when he is naughty about 'Bogey' and the Black man' who carries off bad boys; or about the golden fairy who is to give him toffey and gingerbread-when he is good. By and bye, as he grows older, his sister Mary reads to him, and at last he learns to read for himself, the charming adventures of the Fox and the Crow,' Billy-Goat Gruff,' 'Sindbad the Sailor,' or 'Diamonds and Pearls; the delicious history of Puss in Boots,' the tragedy of 'Blue Beard,' or the heroic drama of Jack the Giant-killer.' But whichever of these, or a hundred other such delightful pages, it be, his faith is boundless. Happiest of mortals, for a time at least, he can believe all he reads; with the one happy proviso that if it is not true, it ought to be, ay, and is, because his sister says so. While he is absorbed in the misfortunes of the 'Tin Soldier' or the Ugly Duck,' the breakfast bell is unheard, and dinner unheeded; he is feasting in Dream-land, on stirabout in the Giant's Castle, or on those famous cheese-cakes of Queen Scheherezade, whose vital charm was pepper. Not that he is forgetful of fact, even while in the full pursuit of fiction. Indeed, he is always burning for facts. He wishes to know what glass is, where Robinson Crusoe was buried, how much gold it takes to make the inside of a watch, why the sun sets later in June than December, what thunder is, if the end of the rainbow touches the ground, why firing off a cannon once made a man deaf, what sago is, and a thousand other things, which papa, not being a walking encyclopædia, is not always ready to tell him. And whatever answer he can obtain he is ready to believe impli

citly, as long as he is dealt fairly with. Yet, though St. George and the Dragon, Ali Baba, and Robinson Crusoe, are in one sense as true to him as the History of England, there are shades and degrees of belief in his own mind both as regards the domains of fact and fiction, which he cannot perhaps define, and of which he is scarcely sensible, yet on which he unconsciously acts; setting each narrative or story, tale or fable, romance or chronicle, in its own due place, and giving to each his own royal favour and approval as good, bad, or indifferent. A child in good sound health is insatiably curious, his thirst for fiction of one shape or other is quenchless; and if he never asks questions, and cares nothing for Jack and the Bean-stalk,' or 'The Lad who went to the North Wind,' there is a screw loose somewhere or other; he is in a morbid, unhealthy state of body or mind, probably of both; his natural growth and tastes, as a child, are becoming stunted and diseased; forced into some narrow, petty channel, where ignorance or bigotry will soon blot out the freshness, grace, and light, that are childhood's most precious possessions.

Our present aim is to glance over the wide domain of Children's Books of Fiction, and endeavour, as far as our limits will allow, to show what classes and kinds are healthy, and likely to add to a child's true enjoyment and real good, and which are unhealthy, and sure to do him harm. But first we have to deal with the word 'fiction,' on the true meaning of which the force of much that we have to say must depend. On the very threshold of the inquiry we are met by Mr. Bounderby and his friends, who indignantly cry out, 'Why fill the poor child's head with a pack of trashy falsehoods, instead of true facts from history?' going clearly on the plain supposition that fiction is all false, and history all true. But will either assertion stand? Fiction' springs from fingere,' which, in its primary sense, means to frame or fashion. Fiction is, literally, that which is framed. Thus, a certain man, a Lysippo fingi volebat,'* wished to have his statue carved by Lysippus; and so Cicero, telling of the cleverest of all craftsmen, says 'fingunt apes favos;'t but neither the statue nor the dainty pentagon of wax was a fiction in the sense of falsehood; though fingere' has for its second meaning to imagine, or feign. Fiction, as we shall see by and bye, is not all false; but is history all true? If so, whose history shall we take? That by Macaulay, Dr. Cumming, David Hume, or Dr. Lingard? Shall we look at matters through yellow, green,

*Ovid, 2 Trist.' v. 489.

† Cicero, 'pro Mur.': c. 29.

blue,

blue, blue and yellow, or plain white spectacles? Is any one of these all true,* as prepared by Hume for Whigs and sceptics of the last century, or by Macaulay for ourselves; or, turning to the exact point before us, as it is prepared for the infant mind by Miss Corner, Mr. Neale, or Mr. Dickens? Are we with Mr. Dickens to tell children that 'Henry VIII. was a most intolerable ruffian, a disgrace to human nature, and a blot of blood and grease upon the history of England?' Or, of James I.-These disputes, and his hunting and drinking, and his lying in bed, occupied his Sowship very well. The rest of his time he chiefly passed in hugging and slobbering his favourites? ‡ Is it wise or true to say- Mary's Court was a model for that of a Christian Princess, her sister Elizabeth's a perfect den of wickedness; her goodness was her own, her faults were her advisers'?'§ Or to tell a boy that-In this reign Milton wrote his "Paradise Lost," a remarkable proof that it does not always please God to bestow the greatest gifts on good men?' || thus leading the child to infer that Milton was a bad man. Nor is it justifiable to describe B. Franklin only as 'a great instigator of rebellion.' ¶, Nor is Miss Corner much more satisfactory when she thus sums up Queen Mary's reign into a single paragraph:-The reign of Mary lasted five years, and there is little to tell about it except that she did all she could to restore the Roman Catholic religion, and re-established some of the monasteries! **

It will not do, therefore, to contrast fiction with history, as if the one were all true, and the other all false. Even as to matters of fact, historians contradict each other. Each writer tells us what he thinks, or wishes, or believes to have happened ;†† relying mainly on somebody else's opinions, who said or wrote that such and such was the case according to his view of the matter; he relying on somebody else's words nearer still to the time; the whole picture thus coming to us at third or fourth hand, each authority having given to it a fresh varnish or coat of paint in exact accordance with the spectacles which he wore at the time. But as history is not all absolutely true, so neither is fiction all false. Landseer's picture of a dog is not a dog; but it is so like one, and so near being one, that our Skye-terrier 'Jack' will cock his ears and bark at it: and we endorse Jack's' verdict by

*All true?' says C. Lamb, 'I have just been reading Burnet's Book, cram full of scandal as all true history is.'

† Dickens' History of England for Children,' p. 278. Dickens, p. 336. § History for Children,' p. 171, by Rev. J. M. Neale. Ibid., p. 242. ¶ Ibid., p. 277. **History for Children,' p. 105.

tt Guesses at Truth,' p. 372-3.

saying,

6

saying, That is a dog.' So, with any other work of fiction, in the land of painting or of books. If we walk into the Exhibition of the Royal Academy, and see among the portraits that of a gentleman with dark, oily ringlets, a double chin, small eyes, and a strongly-hooked Roman nose, we say at once, Ah! that's the famous Michael Moses, Esq., Radical M.P. for Little Pedlington; meaning, not that it is the moiety of flesh and blood now charming Mr. Gladstone in the House of Commons (on the subject of a revised Catechism for Quakers and Jewish children in National Schools), but his 'vera effigies,' his alter ego, his other self. So with a book of fiction, if the picture of a man or a dog, a boy or a frog, a fairy godmother or a tin soldier, be naturally, honestly, drawn out of fair materials, without exaggeration and without partiality, to him who reads, and as in the case of the picture believes, it is true.

6

And if, at times, it so happens that fiction seems even more strange than fact, it is so simply because in life we see but a part of the hidden motives, the secret causes, from which events spring, and only a part of the effects which they produce; while in fiction we are often told all the seeming motives, the secret causes, the hidden seeds out of which events grow. Fiction seldom paints life as it truly is, though the stream of life is so chequered that no incident can be devised which has not some counterpart in reality. And yet fiction ought to be, and is, in some sense a picture of life; and so far has power, and ought, to teach true things. But, at this point, in steps Mr. Bounderby again, with his odd ally Miss Religious Morality, boldly asserting that fables and fairy stories, Jack the Giant-killer,' and Cinderella,' are not pictures of life, as it really is. Birds do not talk, nor oxen, nor frogs; nor do crows eat stolen cheese in oaktrees, while the fox watches below; tin soldiers never meet witches on the high-road; nor are there any such things as fairies, dwarfs, goblins, or giants. True, we reply, quite true. Grown-up people are far too clever, too wise, in this enlightened generation, to believe any such trumpery. They prove their superior intelligence and higher wisdom by believing in spiritrapping, table-turning, and electro-biology; in Professor Humbugs who can't write, and in literary spirits who cannot spell. There are no such things as giants, fairies, talking crows, or tin soldiers; and no child, with an ounce of brains, ever in sober reality believes that the fox talked to the crane about the scarcity of provisions and invited her to supper on gravy-soup in shallow dishes, or that the crane returned the compliment by asking master Reynard to eat minced-meat out of a long jar with a

narrow

narrow neck. But he reads the story, and in his own way quietly draws the lesson; he sees that knavery met with its match, and that cunning was snared in a pit of his own digging. So with the charming old story of Diamonds and Pearls.' Good Temper goes to the well, and with a bright smiling face and kindly words gives drink to an old woman (the fairy), and thenceforth from her lips fall diamonds and pearls whenever she opens her mouth. Ill Temper goes to the well, meets the same old woman, and grudgingly with surly words gives a drink when asked for it, hoping to gain her sister's reward. But instantly there fall from her lips a shower of toads and snakes. Henry and Mary, as they read, quietly draw the lesson of the value and blessing of kindly, gentle words, and the curse of selfishness; without a sentence of moral or preaching, or even the mention of a pet text. And no less so with 'Jack the Giant-killer,' or any other such atrociously false book. 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 hero; but he bravely and boldly perseveres, hunts out and defies the giants, out-manœuvres the dwarfs—and at last triumphs, 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

*P. 238.