SELECT FABLES." BY THOMAS BEWICK (1784)]

[Illustration: "LITTLE ANTHONY." ILLUSTRATION FROM "THE LOOKING-GLASS OF
THE MIND." BY THOMAS BEWICK (1792)]

[Illustration: "LITTLE ADOLPHUS." ILLUSTRATION FROM "THE LOOKING-GLASS
OF THE MIND." BY THOMAS BEWICK (1792)]

It would be out of place here to project any theory to account for this
more recent homage paid to children, but it is quite certain that a
similar number of THE STUDIO could scarce have been compiled a century
ago, for there was practically no material for it. In fact the tastes of
children as a factor to be considered in life are well-nigh as modern as
steam or the electric light, and far less ancient than printing with
movable types, which of itself seems the second great event in the
history of humanity, the use of fire being the first.

To leave generalities and come to particulars, as we dip into the stores
of earlier centuries the broadsheets reveal almost nothing _intended_
for children--the many Robin Hood ballads, for example, are decidedly
meant for grown-up people; and so in the eighteenth century we find its
chap-books of "Guy, Earl of Warwick," "Sir Bevis, of Southampton,"
"Valentine and Orson," are still addressed to the adult; while it is
more than doubtful whether even the earliest editions in chap-book form
of "Tom Thumb," and "Whittington" and the rest, now the property of the
nursery, were really published for little ones. That they were the
"light reading" of adults, the equivalent of to-day's _Ally Sloper_ or
the penny dreadful, is much more probable. No doubt children who came
across them had a surreptitious treat, even as urchins of both sexes now
pounce with avidity upon stray copies of the ultra-popular and so-called
comic papers. But you could not call _Ally Sloper_, that Punchinello of
the Victorian era--who has received the honour of an elaborate article
in the _Nineteenth Century_--a child's hero, nor is his humour of a sort
always that childhood should understand--"Unsweetened Gin," the
"Broker's Man," and similar subjects, for example. It is quite possible
that respectable people did not care for their babies to read the
chap-books of the eighteenth century any more than they like them now to
study "halfpenny comics"; and that they were, in short, kitchen
literature, and not infantile. Even if the intellectual standard of
those days was on a par in both domains, it does not prove that the
reading of the kitchen and nursery was