The literature which we are considering was indeed a serious attempt at holding intercourse with childish minds. It had the embarrassment of beginnings; there was about it an uncertain groping in the dark of childhood, and it was desperately theory-ridden. But it had also the mark of sincerity, and one feels in reading it that the writers were genuinely indifferent in most cases to the figure they might be cutting before the world; they were bent upon reaching this audience, and were unobservant of the larger world behind. In most cases, I say. I suspect that Mrs. Barbauld, with her solemn dullness, was the victim of a notion that she was producing a new order of literature, and in this she was encouraged by a circle of older readers; the children probably stared at her with sufficient calmness to keep her ignorant of their real thoughts. How real literature looked upon the dusty high-road laid out across the fields by some of these writers may be read in the letters of the day. Coleridge jibed at that “pleonasm of nakedness,” Mrs. Bare-bald, and Lamb in a letter to Coleridge speaks his mind with refreshing frankness: “Goody Two Shoes,” he says, “is almost out of print. Mrs. Barbauld’s stuff has banished all the old classics of the nursery; and the shopman at Newberry’s hardly deigned to reach them off an old exploded corner of a shelf when Mary asked for them. Mrs. B.’s and Mrs. Trimmer’s nonsense lay in piles about. Knowledge insignificant and vapid as Mrs. B.’s books convey, it seems, must come to a child in the _shape of knowledge_, and his empty noddle must be turned with conceit of his own powers when he has learned that a horse is an animal, and Billy is better than a horse, and such like; instead of that beautiful interest in wild tales which made the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger than a child. Science has succeeded to poetry no less in the little walks of children than with men. Is there no possibility of averting this sore evil? Think of what you would have been now, if, instead of being fed with tales and old wives’ fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history! Hang them! I mean the cursed reasoning crew, those blights and blasts of all that is human in man and child.” Yet Lamb and his sister both took a lively interest in genuine books for the young, and their own contributions have, alas! gone the way, for the most part, of other worn-out literature. It was mainly as a direct educative power that this new interest in children first found expression; with it, however, was mingled a more artistic purpose, and the two streams of tendency have ever since been recognizable, sometimes separate, oftener combined. The Lambs’ own work was illustrative of this union of the didactic and the artistic. It is outside the scope of this study to dwell at length upon this phase of literature. It is enough to point out the fact that there is a distinct