and it has appeared in mutilated versions under the
auspices of numerous publishing houses in London and the provinces,
although of late years there have been no new issues. Even in 1802,
Charles Lamb in writing to Coleridge, said--

""Goody Two Shoes" is almost out of print. Mrs Barbauld's stuff has
banished all the old classics of the nursery, and the shopman at
Newbery's hardly deigned to reach them off an old exploded corner of
a shelf, when Mary asked for them. Mrs Barbauld's and Mrs Trimmer's
nonsense lay in piles about. Knowledge, insignificant and vapid as Mrs
Barbauld's books convey, it seems must come to a child in the shape of
knowledge; and his empty noddle must be turned with conceit of his own
powers when he has learnt that a horse is an animal, and Billy is
better than a horse, and such like, instead of that beautiful interest
in wild tales, which made the child a man, while all the time he
suspected himself to be no bigger than a child. Science has succeeded
to poetry no less in the little walks of children than with men. Is
there no possibility of averting this sore evil? Think what you would
have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives'
fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural
history!

"Hang them!--I mean the cursed Barbauld crew, those blights and blasts
of all that is human in man and child."[B]

There must, however, be many parents still living who remember the
delight that the little story gave them in their younger days, and
they will, no doubt, be pleased to see it once more in the form which
was then so familiar to them. The children of to-day, too, will look
on it with some curiosity, on account of the fact that it is one of
the oldest of our nursery tales, and amused and edified their
grand-parents and great grand-parents when they were children, while
they cannot fail to be attracted by its simple, pretty, and
interesting story.

* * * * *

The question of the authorship of the book is still an unsettled one.
It was at one time commonly attributed to Oliver Goldsmith, and no one
who reads the book will consider it to be unworthy of the poet's pen.
We find, however, in Nichol's Literary Anecdotes, that

"It is not perhaps generally known that to Mr Griffith Jones, and a
brother of his, Mr Giles Jones, in conjunction with Mr John Newbery,
the public are indebted for the o