Our books for children must be truthful as well as interesting; and we are quite strong in the belief that they should be true to all our just American ideas. It cannot be expected, indeed, that our story-tellers, poets, and biographers for the young will desert their pleasant arts, and inflict upon their readers prosy essays upon American law, society, reform, and progress. What we should expect and demand is, that our children should be brought up to regard American principles as matters of course; and their books should take these principles for granted, and illustrate them with all possible interest and power. They should be trained in the belief that here the opportunities for education, labor, enterprise, freedom, influence, and prosperity are to be thrown open to all; and the highest encouragement should be given to every one to seek the chief good. We are not afraid to say that our children's books should be thoroughly republican, or, in the best sense of the word, democratic, and should aim to give respect to the genuine man more than to his accidents, and to rank character above circumstance. They should rebuke the ready American failings, the haste to be rich, the passion of ostentation, the rage for extravagance, the habit of exaggeration, the impatience under moderate means, the fever for excitement, and the great disposition to subordinate the true quality of life to the quantity of appliances of living. They should especially assail the failing to which our children are tempted,--the morbid excitement, precocious sensibility, and airs and ambition to which they are prone. Some of our best juvenile books, especially some of our best magazine writers, do great service in this way; and it has seemed to use that we may well learn wisdom from the juvenile literature of France in this matter, and translate with profit many of those excellent books for children which do not for a moment countenance the idea that they are to have any hot-bed forcing, or have their senses and fancy turn upon the passions and cares that belong to mature years. Christendom has no cause for gratitude to France for its adult romantic literature; and it is an offence to American as to English homes for its free notions of married life. But the French literature for the young is quite another matter, and may teach purity and wisdom to the parents who allow their sons and daughters to ape the ways and often the follies of men and women, and spoil the flower and fruit of maturity by forcing open the tender bud of childhood and youth.