Now every child knows that a donkey may change into a Fairy Prince: that is a truth of imagination. But to be polite and say nothing of the lady, every child knows that so donkey would be ass enough to behave as in this narrative. And the good parents who, throughout the later 18th century and the 19th, inflicted this stuff upon children, were sinning against the light. Perrault's Fairy Tales, and Madame D'Aulnoy's were to their hand in translations; "Le Cabinet des Fees", which includes these and M. Galland's "Arabian Nights" and many another collection of delectable stories, extends on my shelves to 41 volumes (the last volume appeared during the fury of the French Revolution!). The brothers Grimm published the first volume of their immortal tales in 1812, the second in 1814. A capital selection from them, charmingly rendered, was edited by our Edgar Taylor in 1823; and drew from Sir Walter Scott a letter of which some sentences are worth our pondering. He writes: There is also a sort of wild fairy interest in [these tales] which makes me think them fully better adapted to awaken the imagination and soften the heart of childhood than the good-boy stories which have been in later years composed for them. In the latter case their minds are, as it were, put into the stocks ... and the moral always consists in good moral conduct being crowned with temporal success. Truth is, I would not give one tear shed over Little Red Riding Hood for all the benefit to be derived from a hundred histories of Jemmy Goodchild. Few nowadays, I doubt, remember Gammer Grethel. She has been ousted by completer, maybe far better, translations of the Grimms' "Household Tales". But turning back, the other day, to the old volume for the old sake's sake (as we say in the West) I came on the Preface--no child troubles with a Preface--and on these wise words: Much might be urged against that too rigid and philosophic (we might rather say, unphilosophic) exclusion of works of fancy and fiction from the libraries of children which is advocated by some. Our imagination is surely as susceptible of improvement by exercise as our judgment or our memory. And that admirable sentence, Gentlemen, is the real text of my discourse to-day. I lay no sentimental stress upon Wordsworth's Ode and its doctrine that 'Heaven lies about us in our infancy.' It was, as you know, a favourite doctrine with our Platonists of the 17th century: and critics who trace back the Ode "Intimations of Immortality" to Henry Vaughan's Happy those early days, when I Shined in my Angel-infancy. might connect it with a dozen passages from authors of that century. Here is one from "Centuries of Meditations" by that poor Welsh parson, Thomas Traherne, whom I quoted to you the other day: