for preferring them to the more polished
legends, moral and satiric, which are now, with rich adornment of every
page by very admirable art, presented to the acceptance of the Nursery.

But it seemed to me to matter so little to the majestic independence of
the child-public, who, beside themselves, liked, or who disliked, what
they pronounced entertaining, that it is only on strict claims of a
promise unwarily given that I venture on the impertinence of eulogy; and
my reluctance is the greater, because there is in fact nothing very
notable in these tales, unless it be their freedom from faults which for
some time have been held to be quite the reverse of faults by the
majority of readers.

125. In the best stories recently written for the young, there is a
taint which it is not easy to define, but which inevitably follows on
the author's addressing himself to children bred in schoolrooms and
drawing-rooms, instead of fields and woods--children whose favorite
amusements are premature imitations of the vanities of elder people, and
whose conceptions of beauty are dependent partly on costliness of dress.
The fairies who interfere in the fortunes of these little ones are apt
to be resplendent chiefly in millinery and satin slippers, and appalling
more by their airs than their enchantments.

The fine satire which, gleaming through every playful word, renders some
of these recent stories as attractive to the old as to the young, seems
to me no less to unfit them for their proper function. Children should
laugh, but not mock; and when they laugh, it should not be at the
weaknesses and the faults of others. They should be taught, as far as
they are permitted to concern themselves with the characters of those
around them, to seek faithfully for good, not to lie in wait maliciously
to make themselves merry with evil: they should be too painfully
sensitive to wrong to smile at it; and too modest to constitute
themselves its judges.

126. With these minor errors a far graver one is involved. As the
simplicity of the sense of beauty has been lost in recent tales for
children, so also the simplicity of their conception of love. That word
which, in the heart of a child, should represent the most constant and
vital part of its being; which ought to be the sign of the most solemn
thoughts that inform its awakening soul and, in one wide mystery of pure
sunrise, should flood the zenith of its heaven, and gleam on the dew at
its feet;