Laboulaye says in his introduction to Nouveaux Contes Bleus:
"Mothers who love your children, do not set them too soon to the study
of history; let them dream while they are young. Do not close the soul
to the first breath of poetry. Nothing affrights me so much as the
reasonable, practical child who believes in nothing that he cannot
touch. These sages of ten years are, at twenty, dullards, or what is
still worse, egoists."_

_When a child has once read of Prince Agib, of Gulnare or Periezade,
Sinbad or Codadad, in this or any other volume of its kind, the magic
will have been instilled into the blood, for the Oriental flavour in the
Arab tales is like nothing so much as magic. True enough they are a vast
storehouse of information concerning the manners and the customs, the
spirit and the life of the Moslem East (and the youthful reader does not
have to study Lane's learned foot-notes to imbibe all this), but beyond
and above the knowledge of history and geography thus gained, there
comes something finer and subtler as well as something more vital. The
scene is Indian, Egyptian, Arabian, Persian; but Bagdad and Balsora,
Grand Cairo, the silver Tigris, and the blooming gardens of Damascus,
though they can be found indeed on the map, live much more truly in that
enchanted realm that rises o'er "the foam of perilous seas in faery
lands forlorn." What craft can sail those perilous seas like the book
that has been called a great three-decker to carry tired people to
Islands of the Blest? "The immortal fragment," says Sir Richard Burton,
who perhaps knew the Arabian Nights as did no other European, "will
never be superseded in the infallible judgment of childhood. The
marvellous imaginativeness of the Tales produces an insensible
brightness of mind and an increase of fancy-power, making one dream that
behind them lies the new and unseen, the strange and unexpected--in
fact, all the glamour of the unknown."_

_It would be a delightful task to any boy or girl to begin at the
beginning and read the first English version of these famous stories,
made from the collection of M. Galland, Professor of Arabic in the Royal
College of Paris. The fact that they had passed from Arabic into French
and from French into English did not prevent their instantaneous
popularity. This was in 1704 or thereabouts, and the world was not so
busy as it is nowadays, or young men would not have gathered in the
middle of the night under M. Galland's wi