It is strange with what different feelings an author and a bookseller look at the same manuscript. I know this by experience: I was an author, I am a bookseller. The author thinks what will conduce to his honour; the bookseller, what will cause his commodities to sell. You, or some other wise man, I have heard to say [it was Johnson]: It is children that read children’s books, when they are read, but it is parents that choose them. The critical thought of the tradesman puts itself therefore into the place of the parent, and what the parent will condemn. We live in squeamish days. Amid the beauties of your manuscript, of which no man can think more highly than I do, what will the squeamish say to such expressions as these, ‘devoured their limbs, yet warm and trembling, lapping the blood,’ page 10. Or to the giant’s vomit, page 14, or to the minute and shocking description of the extinguishing the giant’s eye in the page following. You, I dare say, have no formed plan of excluding the female sex from among your readers, and I, as a bookseller, must consider that, if you have, you exclude one half of the human species. Nothing is more easy than to modify these things if you please, and nothing, I think, is more indispensable.... The main argument here stated daily confronts the librarian and the author; it is one so often over-considered, that in its wake it leaves a diluted literature, mild in expression, faint in impression, weak in situation, and lacking in colour. There is a certain literary style that, through zealous regard for refinement, misses the rugged vitality which marks the old-time story, and which constitutes its chief hold upon life. On the other hand, children need very little stimulation, provided it is virile, to set them in active accord; and it is wise for publishers to consider the omissions of those unnecessary details, situations, or actions, without which the story is in no way harmed. But to curtail or to dilute the full meaning, to give a part for the whole, has resulted in producing so many versions of the same tale or legend as to make the young reader doubt which is the correct one; and in most cases leave in him no desire to turn to the original source. On your library shelves, are you to have five or six versions of the same story, issued by as many rival publishing houses, or are you to discard them all and take only that one which is _nearest_ the original in spirit and in general excellence? Lamb here brushed against the problem of writing for the popular taste. This is how he met it: MARCH 11, 1808. DEAR GODWIN: