I have been led into a long digression through the natural correlation which exists between childhood in literature and a literature for children. Let me get back to my main topic by a similar path. The one author in America whose works yield the most fruitful examples in illustration of our subject is Hawthorne, and at the same time he is the most masterly of all our authors who have aimed at writing for an audience of children. Whatever may become of the great mass of books for young people published in America during the past fifty years,—and most of it is already crumbling in memory,—it requires no heroism to predict an immortality of fame for the little books which Hawthorne wrote with so much good nature and evident pleasure, Grandfather’s Chair and the Wonder Book, with its companion, Tanglewood Tales. Mr. Parkman has given a new reading in the minds of many people to the troubles in Acadia, but he has not disturbed the vitality of Evangeline; one may add footnote after footnote to modify or correct the statements in The Courtship of Miles Standish, but the poem will continue to be accepted as a picture of Pilgrim times. So the researches of antiquarians, with more material at their command than Hawthorne enjoyed, may lead them to different conclusions from those which he reached in his sketches of early New England history, but they cannot destroy that charm in the rendering which makes the book a classic. More notable still is Hawthorne’s version of Greek myths. Probably he had no further authority for the stories than Lemprière. He only added the touch of his own genius. Only! and the old rods blossomed with a new variety of fruit and flower. It is easily said that Hawthorne Yankeeized the stories, that he used the Greek stones for constructing a Gothic building, but this is academic criticism. He really succeeded in naturalizing the Greek myths in American soil, and all the labors of all the Coxes will not succeed in supplanting them. Moreover, I venture to think that Hawthorne’s fame is more firmly fixed by means of the Wonder Book. The presence of an audience of children had a singular power over him. I do not care for the embroidery of actual child life which he has devised for these tales; it is scarcely more than a fashion, and already strikes one as quaint and out of date. But I cannot read the tales themselves without being aware that Hawthorne was breathing one air when he was writing them and another when he was at work on his romances. He illustrates in a delicate and subtle manner the line of Juvenal which bids the old remember the respect due to the young. Juvenal uses it to shame men into decorum; but just as any sensitive person will restrain himself in expression before children, so Hawthorne appears to have restrained his thought in their silent presence,—to have done this, and also to have admitted into it the sunshine which their presence brought. With what bright and joyous playfulness he repeats the old stories,