r pupils.

To us, this hollow gaiety sounds almost cruel. In those days children
were always regarded as if, to quote Mark Twain, "every one being born
with an equal amount of original sin, the pressure on the square inch
must needs be greater in a baby." Poor little original sinners, how very
scurvily the world of books and picture-makers treated you less than a
century ago! Life for you then was a perpetual reformatory, a place
beset with penalties, and echoing with reproofs. Even the literature
planned to amuse your leisure was stuck full of maxims and morals; the
most piquant story was but a prelude to an awful warning; pictures of
animals, places, and rivers failed to conceal undisguised lessons. The
one impression that is left by a study of these books is the lack of
confidence in their own dignity which papas and mammas betrayed in the
early Victorian era. This seems past all doubt when you realise that the
common effort of all these pictures and prose is to glorify the
impeccable parent, and teach his or her offspring to grovel silently
before the stern law-givers who ruled the home.

[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE FROM "THE SCOURING OF THE WHITE HORSE." BY
RICHARD DOYLE (MACMILLAN AND CO. 1858)]

Of course it was not really so, literature had but lately come to a
great middle class who had not learned to be easy; and as worthy folk
who talked colloquially wrote in stilted parody of Dr. Johnson's stately
periods, so the uncouth address in print to the populace of the nursery
was doubtless forgotten in daily intercourse. But the conventions were
preserved, and honest fun or full-bodied romance that loves to depict
gnomes and hob-goblins, giants and dwarfs in a world of adventure and
mystery, was unpopular. Children's books were illustrated entirely by
the wonders of the creation, or the still greater wonders of so-called
polite society. Never in them, except introduced purposely as an "awful
example," do you meet an untidy, careless, normal child. Even the
beggars are prim, and the beasts and birds distinctly genteel in their
habits. Fairyland was shut to the little ones, who were turned out of
their own domain. It seems quite likely that this continued until the
German _maerchen_ (the literary products of Germany were much in favour
at this period) reopened the wonderland of the other world about the
time that Charles Dickens helped to throw the door still wider.
Discovering that the child possessed the right to be