Can we recall any of our great men--literary, scientific, or otherwise--who were brought up on distinctively juvenile literature. A present-day boy who would read what Lamb or Wordsworth, Coleridge or Tennyson, Gladstone or Huxley devoured with gusto in their youth, would set the psychologists in a flutter, would become an object for head-lines in our papers. There is a mistaken conception regarding what are children’s books, in the best sense of the word. A standard which might have excellent conservative results, although it would be thoroughly one-sided and liable to false interpretation, could be based on the assertion that those books only are children’s classics which can be relished by a grown-up public. “Alice in Wonderland,” “The Water Babies,” “Peter Pan”--such stories have a universal appeal. And it is well to remember that at least five of the world’s classics, not originally written for children, have been appropriated by them: “The Arabian Nights”; “Pilgrim’s Progress”; “Robinson Crusoe”; “Gulliver’s Travels”; “Baron Münchausen.” With the reading democracy created by public libraries, there has developed the need for this special kind of writing. Excesses have unfortunately arisen such as made a critic once exclaim in disgust, “Froissart is cut into spoon-meat, and Josephus put into swaddling clothes.” While we shall, in the following pages, find many odd theories and statements regarding simplification of style, it is as well to be forearmed against this species of writing. Democracy in literature is falsely associated with mediocrity. When one reads the vitiating “series” class of story-book, the colourless college record, the diluted historical narrative, there is cause for despair. But there is no need for such cheapening. The wrong impression is being created in the popular mind that literature is synonymous with dulness; that only current fiction is worth while. And we find children confessing that they rarely read non-fiction, a term they only dimly comprehend. It is not right that a middle-class population should have relegated to it a middle-class literature. Such, however, at the present moment, seems to be the situation. And as a consequence all departments suffer. Except for a very few volumes, there is no biography for children that is worthy of endorsement, for the simple reason that the dignity of a whole life, its meaning and growth, are subordinated to the accentuation of a single incident. History becomes a handmaiden to the slender story. Let those writers who are looking for an unworked vein ponder this. The fictionising of all things is one of the causes for this poverty; the text-book habit another. The poet Blake sings: “Thou hast a lap full of seed, And this is a fine country. Why dost thou not cast thy seed, And live in it merrily?”