The fare provided in the children’s department consists, not only of books, but also of the best juvenile magazines, together with a sprinkling of illustrated weeklies and monthlies intended by the producers for readers of any age. Easy French magazines are sometimes provided. On the reference shelves stand suitable encyclopædias, atlases and gazetteers, dictionaries of several languages, works on local history and topography, illustrated natural histories, the works of the poets, and many other books that are likely to prove useful to children in their home work. The choice of books for children is a different thing now from what it was before the advent of Kingsley, Kingston, and Kipling. With a few exceptions, the didactic trash that constituted the whole stock of children’s literature a century ago may now be jettisoned, along with a still greater volume of more recent lumber depressingly written down to the childish intellect. Any modern author, for children or any one else, knows, if he knows his business at all, that the first thing to avoid is the habit or affectation or process of writing down to an inferior mind. Lewis Carroll, Sir James Barrie, Walter de la Mare conquered the child by writing as children themselves, and writing their best, writing with all their genius and with all the gusto due to things that are high and serious. Didactic writing is always bad. It cannot help being bad. The moment a writer begins to think of his audience instead of his subject, he becomes self-conscious and artificial. Worst of all when he has the effrontery to think of that audience as inferior to himself, and tries to adapt his thoughts to feebler understandings. Children are not slower than those of riper age to detect the false note, and be insulted by the condescension. Thus it is far better to offer children books that have been written for their elders than such as have been manufactured on the plan of mild adulteration. In fact, a very large proportion of the best books in the junior library belong to this higher category. _Robinson Crusoe_ and _Gulliver_ are obvious examples; _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ is another; _Kidnapped_ will be received as warmly as _Treasure Island_ or _The Black Arrow_, and if _Lavengro_ has not such a universal appeal there will be no hesitation about _The Cloister and the Hearth_. Many of the novels of Blackmore and Stanley Weyman, most of Dickens’s, some of Thackeray’s and all of Scott’s are on the shelves of every good children’s library; and Jane Austen, Mrs. Gaskell, and some at any rate of George Eliot’s novels will meet the taste of girls. Many works of travel, some histories, and biographies not a few, such as the delightful life of Frank Buckland, are as much in place here as in the senior library; and among the poets and essayists the same freedom of choice may safely be exercised. Both publishers and librarians are now at one in seeing that there is nothing shoddy in