[Illustration: _The Juvenile Biographer 83_ When Mi[f.]s Fiddle Faddle is in the Company of little Females of her Acquaintance, her whole Di[f.]cour[f.]e turns on the prevailing Fa[f.]hion of Head-dre[f.]s; what an elegant Ta[f.]te one little Mi[f.]s has, and how terribly impolite is another. Page from _The Juvenile Biographer_] The painfully religious tales of James Janeway were not the only ones to familiarize death to the reading child. _The Fairchild Family_ was once deemed a most charming, as it was certainly a most earnest book, and it has ever had popularity, for within a few years it has been reprinted in a large edition. I wonder how many death-bed scenes and references there are in that book! Nor are ordinary death-beds the saddest or most grewsome scenes. The little Fairchilds having lost their little tempers and pommelled each other somewhat, their father takes them as a shocking object-lesson to see the body of a man hung in chains on a gibbet. The horror of the progress through the gloomy wood to this revolting sight, the father's unsparing comments, the hideous account of the _thing,_ rattling, swinging, turning its horrible countenance while Mr. Fairchild described and explained and gloated over it, and finally kneeled and prayed,--all this through several pages no carefully reared child to-day would be permitted to read. Mr. Fairchild's reason for taking them to this gibbeted corpse should not be omitted from this account; it was "to show them something which I think they will remember as long as they live, that they may love each other with perfect and heavenly love." A painful and ever present lesson found on every page is the sinfulness of the world. The children recite verses and quote Bible texts to prove that all mankind have bad hearts, and Lucy commits to memory a prayer, a portion of which runs thus:-- "My heart is so exceedingly wicked, so vile, so full of sin, that even when I appear to be tolerably good, even then I am sinning. When I am praying, or reading the Bible, or hearing other people read the Bible, even then I sin. When I speak, I sin; when I am silent, I sin." _Sandford and Merton_ is most insincerely recommended by many folk to children to-day. I cannot believe any one who has recently read the book would ever expect a modern child to care for it. It is haloed in the memory of people who read it in their youth and fancy they still like it, but won't take the trouble to read it and see that they don't. Jane and Ann Taylor should be added to this class of authors. The poem, _My Mother_, by Ann Taylor, was published in book form, and had many imitations. _My Father, My Sister, My Brother, My Grandmother, My Playmate, My Pony, My Fido_, and lastly, _My Governess_,--all, says the advertisement, "in the same stile,"--a style so easily imitated as to seem almost like parody:--