By a natural instinct, writers for children began at once to write about children. They were moved by educational rather than by artistic impulses, so that their creations were subordinate to the lessons which they conveyed. During the period when Wordsworth, Lamb, De Quincey, and Blake were idealizing childhood, and seeing in it artistic possibilities, there flourished a school of writing for the young which also dealt with childhood, but with a sturdy realism. This school had its representatives in Mrs. Barbauld, Mr. Day, the Aikens, Maria Edgeworth, Ann and Jane Taylor, and holds a place still with Evenings at Home, The Parent’s Assistant, Hymns in Prose for Children, Hymns for Infant Minds, Frank, and Sandford and Merton. The characteristics of this literature are simple, and will be recalled by many who dwell with an affectionate and regretful regard upon books which they find it somewhat difficult to persuade their children to read. These books were didactic; they assumed in the main the air of wise teachers; they were sometimes condescending; they appealed to the understanding rather than to the imagination of the child, and they abounded in stores of useful information upon all manner of subjects. They contained precursors of a long series of juvenile monitors, and the grandfathers who knew Mr. Barlow had children who knew Mr. Holiday, Rollo, Jonas, and Mr. George, and grandchildren who may be suspected of an acquaintance with Mr. Bodley and his much traveled and very inquisitive family. Yet, the earlier works, though now somewhat antiquated, were not infrequently lively and even humorous in their portraiture of children. They were written in the main out of a sincere interest in the young, and by those who were accustomed to watch the unfolding of childish nature. If they reflected a somewhat formal relation between the old and the young, it must be remembered that the actual relation was a formal one: that the young had not yet come into familiar and genial relation with the old. Indeed, the books themselves were somewhat revolutionary in a small way. Much that seems stiff and even unnatural to us now was quite easy and colloquial to their first readers, and in their eagerness to lure children into ways of pleasant instruction, the authors broke down something of the reserve which existed between fathers and sons in the English life which they portrayed. Yet we cannot help being struck by the contrast between the sublimated philosophy of Wordsworth and the prosaic applications of the Edgeworth school. Heaven lies about us in our infancy? Oh, yes, a heaven that is to be looked at through a spy-glass and explained by means of a home-made orrery. It would seem as if the spirit of childhood had been discerned with all its inherent capacity, but that the actual children of this matter-of-fact world had not yet been fairly seen by the light of this philosophy.