This is very amusing, but a little absurd, and a little vulgar as well. It strikes that jarring note of provincialism which Matthew Arnold condemns with all the weight of his critical eloquence in Kinglake’s “Invasion of the Crimea.” “Wee Willie Winkie, child of the Dominant Race,” is on a literary level with the description of Marshal St. Arnaud, cowed by “the majesty of the great Elchi’s Canning brow and tight, merciless lips;” a style of writing bad enough in newspaper correspondence, but unpardonable in artistic fiction. How has it happened that Mr. Kipling, who tells us with such irresistible grace and simplicity the “Story of Muhammad Din,” should stray into mock heroics when handling the children of his own nation, the jolly well-bred little English lads, to whom all picturesque posing is an art unknown. Perhaps the trouble lies in the curious but highly esteemed fallacy that the child of fiction is expected to be always precocious and sprightly, to emit sparks like a cat, and electrify the sluggish atmosphere about him. He does this at the expense alike of his sincerity and of his manners; we cannot accept him as a fact, and we don’t approve of him as a theory. A few years ago a critic in the _Contemporary Review_ protested very seriously against such writers as Florence Montgomery, “by whom the bloom of unconsciousness has been wiped from childhood, and boys and girls have learned to see themselves, not like old-fashioned children, as good and naughty, but as picturesque beings, whose naughtiness has an attractive charm, and whose very imperfections of dialect are worth accurate record.” Most of us are only too familiar with this kind of fiction, which for a time enjoyed such great and hurtful popularity. The patronizing attitude of children to their parents is sufficiently illustrated by the really nice little boy in “Transformed,” who calls his father “Puppy,” a most objectionable thing for a nice little boy to do; while what might be termed the corrective attitude of children to their parents is still more sharply defined by that unpleasant child, Nina Middleton, who sees so clearly, and suffers so intensely from the “careless superficiality” and rigid narrowness of the unfortunate couple whose painful privilege it was to have given her birth.