military renown, and love of theatrical effects; in Germany, misty abstractions and unprofitable sensiblerie. Such are among the qualities, the reproduction of which seems destined to be eternal, and which go to form what is called national character. We know few things more useful, few that would require more sound and enlarged philosophy, than a fair comparison and complete analysis of the children's books of these three nations, so nearly on a level in civilization, so different in spirit. They are the mould in which each generation fashions the succeeding one to its own image, the link which connects the mind already formed, to the tone and temper of its nation with that yielding mind which has its impressions to receive and its bent to take. That which is effected in infancy, by these unregarded instruments, could never be accomplished at a later stage of life by all the weight of science or all the persuasion of eloquence. The imagination has taken its tone, the heart has conceived the wishes, the hopes, the objects, which will be the springs of action through life. The studies of the man may awaken reflection or impart knowledge, but the first books which stirred his fancy or touched his heart, are those which gave an indelible color to his character.

In every country and age, children's books will partake of the prevailing tone of literature; or, rather we should say, in the fresh and vigorous stage of literature will exist no such thing as children's books; because the books fitted to delight a simple and imaginative people, will also delight children.— So long as the literature of England retained its pith and vigor, its simplicity of style and fulness of thought and fancy, we hear nothing of children's books. "Robinson Crusoe" and "Pilgrim's Progress," the two books which have probably been read by a greater number and with greater interest and deeper effect than any others, were certainly not written for children. But as this creative power and simple grandeur were extinct, or nearly so, in the seventeenth century--as the eighteenth, critical and sceptica!, could create nothing that children or child-like men could care to read, it became necessary to make books professedly and specially for the entertainment of children, a sort of industrie never enough to be deplored. Berquin, Madame de Genlis, and a host of imitators in France, Germany and England, sent forth, for the enfeeblement and demoralization of the young world, a mass of affectations and simulations of virtue, pretty much alike in design, but colored in each country to suit the national taste; till at length they attained such a pitch of mawkisnness, that the whole race of faultless, theatrical, preaching and whining papas and mammas, aunts and children, became intolerable and gave place to better things. The original aim of this class of books, was

"to check the immorality of the age In many writers, this was, no doubt, sincere-in many it was affected--in all absurd. The cause of virtue is not to be served by falsehood, and all affectation is falsehood.

This most tiresome and unprofitable class of fictions may be considered to be extinct: it was succeeded by one of a very different character.

The beginning of the present century was marked by a tendency to what the French call material improvement, which has since spread widely and rapidly. From the time when the excitement of war ceased, the minds of Englishmen became absorbed in the pursuits which conduce to wealth or to the physical well-being of man. This movement was instantly accompanid by a corresponding change in the character of children's books. All that could tend to nourish the imagination, or to suggest reflection on the unseen, (self-reflection included,) was rejected as useless and even pernicious. Not only the mawkish modern fictions, but the delightful stories in which were embodied the fancy, the tenderness, the humor, the wisdom of ages,-which had travelled from the remotest climes, and found acceptance among people in every stage of culture, which with some slight change of costume or of incident had been adopted into every tongue,-were denounced as absurd and false. Babes and sucklings were made judges of evidence and calculators of probabilities; and the good-natured old man, who thought to amuse his infant hearer with what had delighted himself, was silenced by the preliminary inquiry, if it was all true? If even Mrs. Barbauld's matchless infants' books were tolerated, it was because they contained some "useful facts," and not for the engaging charm of their childish prattle, or the poetical and religious feeling which pervades them. Facts were now the order of the day.

There is no doubt that the originators of this movement were earnest and sincere reformers. Insofar as their object was to substitute such information as could, by any artifice, be made palatable to children, or such lessons in domestic morality and the conduct of ordinary life as could be illustrated by stories, for the feeble and vulgar dregs of the Berquin school, it was laudable and successful. What they undertook to drive out of the field, was equally devoid of imagination and good sense, or what is called practical knowledge. The time was come when one of these was indispensable.

It belonged to the temper of the age and of the country we live in to choose the latter. One or two admirable and popular writers of children's books, did much to sanction and adorn this taste; but in fact they only obeyed an impulse, which it would have required much greater strength than they possess

ed to resist. They were among the organs and illustrators of a great tendency. The only objects deemed worth striving after are wealth, and political or social consideration. To obtain these, a man must be possessed of some art or knowledge, by which he can make himself immediately useful or acceptable to those who have wealth and consideration to bestow; hence moral science fell into complete neglect, and may be said no longer to have a place in England. The highest speculations, if unconnected with polemical theology, (and hence with political and social power,) have no audience. The cultivation of the reason, the study of the spiritual nature and destiny of man, require more time and abstraction from the world than a competitor in the actual race of life has to give. To what end, then, develop in the child a taste for the impalpable--the unreal, as it is called? We will not say that this train of reasoning passed distinctly through the minds of the makers of children's books; but, by instinct or design, they acted under the prevailing social influences. It is sufficiently evident that the heart and the fancy of childhood cannot take in the objects which fill the minds of "practical" full-grown men; the only means of fitting them for the reception of such views, is to wean them from the bright visions and wandering speculations which are their natural element. Children, therefore, were to be seduced into practical studies by these monsters-formed of more heterogeneous parts than sphinx or chimera--stories to teach facts or morals, or more honestly forced to swallow the chaff of catechisms and compendiums as food. Accordingly, the starry sky, inviting to wonder and worship; the beautiful flowers and animals, objects of its tender care and sympathy, and personages of many a pretty and touching drama; the wide and strange world, and the adventures of its hardy explorers; the heart-stirring events and awful figures of history; all, in short, that could inspire love, pity, reverence and religion, were made the subject of catechisms. We once heard a child say, that she had learned thirteen of these instruments of mental torture and compression by heart. We need not say that the poor thing had, in the operation, lost the peculiar faculties with which heaven in its wisdom endowed the newly-awakened soul. It had, (not willingly, indeed,) bartered its birthright for a mess of pottage,-the sense of the great, the wonderous and the beautiful, the power of placing these in countless combinations--for the memory of barren facts of weight, number and measure, of which it could know neither the connexion nor the evidence.

It may be said that this is an extreme case: we willingly admit it. We are far from denying that in many books, of great excellenc in their kind, the facts are well selected and

amusingly told, and that they are often such as it is a matter of conventional necessity to know--if, indeed, we may abuse, the word knowledge for the mere passive reception of certain assertions, which we take on credit. Such admission of unconnected and undigested matter into the mind, can of course, never be productive of any moral growth or fruit, and should pass for exactly what it is worth--a convenient conformity to general usage. Works of the kind in question, do, perhaps, sometimes answer a higher end; that namely of stimulating the curiosity of children; and if that curiosity is then allowed free course and ample food, an active, fruitful mind may be developed; but we suspect this is very rarely the case.

In the whole of this large class of books England is pre-. eminent, and is justly regarded on the continent as the great fountain of nursery learning. The excellence of the workmanship is as little to be denied as that of the intention. A still more valuable pre-eminence is the unhesitating confidence with which the most careful mothers in Germany give their children English books, compared with the cautious admission of those of other countries. We have remarked with pride, that even those who cannot read English themselves, rest on the generally recognized safe morality of our books for childhood and youth, with a security, which will, we trust, never be deceived.

But while we gladly do homage to all that is praiseworthy in such productions, we confess that we doubt whether the well meant endeavor to bring every thing down to the level of a child's mind, or to cram it with heterogeneous particulars, be favorable to the production or nurture of any large intellect or elevated character. To speak plainly, we are convinced it is not. We complain, and with justice, of the universal diffusion of slight and superficial knowledge-the neglect of philosophy, the reign of empiricism in every branch of science, the absence of all æsthetical culture, the dearth of originality. And how do we attempt to remedy these defects? We give to our children books which are exactly adapted to lay on a varnish of science and literature over the whole surface of society, and to check the natural workings of the infant mind. It is not only the imagination, but the reason of children that is stifled. We have repeatedly seen, and never without wonder, at the conceit it betrayed, a book taken out of the hand of an eager, attentive child, "because he could not understand it;" as if any human being would, for his own amusement, continue to read words to which he affixed no meaning. "Oh, but," we are

told, "he would understand them imperfectly." And what then? If you desire that your child should grow tall and erect, do you confine him in a room, the ceiling of which is exactly as high as his head? If you wish his body to unfold itself and acquire bulk and vigor, do you swathe it in tight bandages? Yet such is exactly the moral practice of good and careful mothers with their children. Nay, the absurdity and cruelty is in this case even greater; for the height and bulk of the body can be ascertained, but who shall take measures of that most wondrous, variable, quick and busy spirit, the mind of a young child? Who shall say that, because it does not understand a thing to-day, it will not understand it to-morrow? An hour, a minute, is often sufficient to snggest new trains of thought and open new combinations of facts. And what a burst of the young buds of reason and imagination have we witnessed, when a child has been left to its own unaided selection among books which it could not understand? At first the little discover has to grope his way through occasional darkness; but the lights that break in upon him are the brighter for the contrast, and lead him on with all the ardor of hope. How far more stimulating than the monotonous twilight to which you would condemn him!" "The only books from which we really learn," says Gothe, "are those which we cannot judge.-The author of a book which we are capable of judging must learn of us."

The early history and training of the greatest men is a subject of the deepest interest, and we have always been extremely anxious to see what were the books from which they received their first impressions. As yet it has not happened to us to have read of or have known a person of vigorous and original mind, who had not been allowed free access to strong meat, as soon as tho appetite for it was excited.

An equally empty pretension is that of "forming the taste" of children, by pointing out the beauties of what they read. This is exactly the process by which to secure their having no taste at all. Beauty wants no showman or direct expositor; she reveals herself to the eyes prepared to behold her; till they are so, there is nothing to be done. She reveals herself too, under a thousand different aspects; each of us must behold her as he can,-as his gifts and opportunities will allow. It is easy to make a child repeat after its mother or teacher, that a passage is beautiful, but no real intuition of beauty was ever the result of any such process.