How delightful to watch this critic armed _cap-a-pie_, demolishing some fad, that has masqueraded for years as genuine literature. Is it little Lord Fauntleroy, a character sloppy, inane, impossible to real life, yet hugged to the heart by the commonplace. Miss Repplier keenly surveys her ground, as an artist would the statue of his rival, notes the foibles, cant, false poses, and crazy-quilt jargon used to deck pet characters. Experience has taught her that you cannot combat seriously the commonplace. “The statesman or the poet,” says Dudley Warner, “who launches out unmindful of this, will be likely to come to grief in his generation.” Sly humor, pungent sarcasm, are the weapons effectively used. The little Lord is unrobed, and the life that seemed so full of charity and virtue, becomes but a mixture of hypocrisy and snobbery. Yet, if some of our critics could, “all the dear old nursery favorites must be banished from our midst, and the rising generation of prigs must be nourished exclusively on Little Lord Fauntleroy, and other carefully selected specimens of milk and water diet.” The dear land of romance, in its most charming phase, that phase represented by Red Riding Hood, Ali Baba, Blue Beard, and the other heroes of our nurseryhood must be eliminated, for children are no longer children, in the old sense of believing “in such stuff” without questioning. American children, at any rate, are too sensitively organized to endure the unredeemed ferocity of the old fairy stories, we are told, and it is added, “no mother nowadays tells them in their unmitigated brutality.” These are the empty sayings of the realists, who would have every child break its dolls to analyze the sawdust. The most casual observer of American homes knows that our children will not be fed on such stuff as realists are able to give, but will turn wistfully back to those brave old tales which are their inheritance from a splendid past, and of which no hand shall rob them. As Miss Repplier so well puts it, “we could not banish Blue Beard if we would. He is as immortal as Hamlet, and when hundreds of years shall have passed over this uncomfortably enlightened world, the children of the future—who, thank Heaven, can never, with all our efforts, be born grown-up—will still tremble at the blood-stained key, and rejoice when the big brave brothers come galloping up the road.” Ferocity, brutality, if you will, may couch on every page, but this is much better than the sugared nothingness of Sunday school tales, and beats all hollow, as the expression goes, the many tricks perpetrated on children by the school of analytical fiction. Children will read Blue Beard, and thank Heaven, as grown-up men, for such a childish pleasure, adding a prayer for her who wrote the “Battle of the Babies.” Bunner and others have accused Miss Repplier of ignoring contemporary works, of rudely closing in their face her library door and saying he who enters here must