ary asked for them. Mrs. B.'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 while 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!"

Hence when the time came Lamb was all ready with a nursery method of
his own.

* * * * *

Page 1. TALES FROM SHAKESPEAR.

Mary Lamb was asked to write the _Tales from Shakespear_, with help
from her brother, in the spring of 1806 or the winter of 1805. I have
seen the statement that this was at the instigation of Hazlitt, but
Lamb does not say so. The first mention of the work is in Lamb's
letter to Manning, May 10, 1806:--

"She [Mary] says you saw her writings about the other day, and she
wishes you should know what they are. She is doing for Godwin's
bookseller twenty of Shakspeare's plays, to be made into children's
tales. Six are already done by her, to wit, 'The Tempest,' 'Winter's
Tale,' 'Midsummer Night,' 'Much Ado,' 'Two Gentlemen of Verona,' and
'Cymbeline'; and the 'Merchant of Venice' is in forwardness. I have
done 'Othello' and 'Macbeth,' and mean to do all the tragedies. I
think it will be popular among the little people, besides money. It's
to bring in sixty guineas. Mary has done them capitally, I think,
you'd think. These are the humble amusements we propose, while you are
gone to plant the cross of Christ among barbarous pagan anthropophagi.
Quam homo homini praestat! but then, perhaps, you'll get murdered, and
we shall die in our beds with a fair literary reputation."

Mary Lamb's letters to Sarah Stoddart (afterwards Sarah Hazlitt),
continue the story. This is on June 2, 1806:--

My _Tales_ are to be published in separate story-books; I mean, in
single stories, like the children's little shilling books. I cannot
send you them in Manuscript, because they