——The Germans possess such a collection of their stories in their popular books of the "Horny Sigfried," of the "Heymon Children," of "Beautiful _Magelone_," "Fortunatus," "The Wandering Jew," "Faust," "The Adventurous Simplicissimus," "The _Schildbürger_," "The Island of Felsenburg," "Lienhard and Gertrude," &c. Also, the art works of the great masters which possess national significance must be spoken of here, as the Don Quixote of Cervantes.—— § 96. The most general form in which the childish imagination finds exercise is that of fairy-tales; but Education must take care that it has these in their proper shape as national productions, and that they are not of the morbid kind which poetry so often gives us in this species of literature, and which not seldom degenerate to sentimental caricatures and silliness. ——The East Indian stories are most excellent because they have their origin with a childlike people who live wholly in the imagination. By means of the Arabian filtration, which took place in Cairo in the flourishing period of the Egyptian caliphs, all that was too characteristically Indian was excluded, and they were made in the "Tales of Scheherezade," a book for all peoples, with whose far-reaching power in child-literature, the local stories of a race, as e.g. Grimm's admirable ones of German tradition, cannot compare. Fairy-tales made to order, as we often see them, with a mediæval Catholic tendency, or very moral and dry, are a bane to the youthful imagination in their stale sweetness. We must here add, however, that lately we have had some better success in our attempts since we have learned to distinguish between the naïve natural poetry, which is without reflection, and the poetry of art, which is conditioned by criticism and an ideal. This distinction has produced good fruits even in the picture-books of children. The pretensions of the gentlemen who printed illustrated books containing nothing more solid than the alphabet and the multiplication table have become less prominent since such men as Speckter, Fröhlich, Gutsmuths, Hofman (the writer of "Slovenly Peter"), and others, have shown that seemingly trivial things can be handled with intellectual power, if one is blessed with it, and that nothing is more opposed to the child's imagination than the _childishness_ with which so many writers for children have fallen when they attempted to descend with dignity from their presumably lofty stand-point. Men are beginning to understand that Christ promised the kingdom of heaven to little children on other grounds than because they had as it were the privilege of being thoughtless and foolish.——