Great mistakes have been made in writing books for children. When Sir Walter Scott was about to write his _Tales of a Grandfather_, he remarked: “I am persuaded both children and the lower class of readers hate books which are written _down_ to their capacity, and love those that are composed for their elders and betters. I will make, if possible, a book that a child shall understand, yet a man should feel some temptation to peruse should he chance to take it up.... The grand and interesting consists in ideas, not in words.” Again, “the problem of narrating history is at once to excite and gratify the curiosity of youth, and please and instruct the wisest of mature minds.”[82] --------------------- Footnote 82: Lockhart’s _Life of Scott_. ---------------------------- THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. The treasures of our tongue, says Dr. Richardson, the lexicographer, are spread over continents, and cultivated among islands in the northern and the southern hemisphere, from “the unformed Occident to the strange shores of unknowing nations in the East.” The sun, indeed, now never sets upon the empire of Great Britain. Not one hour of the twenty-four in which the earth completes her diurnal revolution, not one round of the minute-hand of the dial, is allowed to pass, in which, on some portion of the surface of the globe, the air is not filled with “accents that are ours.” They are heard in the ordinary transactions of life, or in the administration of law, or in the deliberations of the senate-house or council-chamber, or in the offices of private devotion, or in the public observance of the rites and duties of a common faith. Dr. Richardson’s _Dictionary of the English Language_, the foremost work of its class, we owe greatly to the judicious energy of Mr. Pickering, the publisher, who laid out two thousand pounds in books, specially for this great labour, before it was commenced. If publishers would imitate Mr. Pickering’s liberality oftener than is done, there would be fewer incomplete and abortive compilations than are yearly issued from the press. Dr. Richardson acknowledges this valuable aid in his Preface, where he justly makes his boast of bringing within the circle of his reading a large number of books which had never been employed for lexicographical purposes before; and Dean Trench acknowledges that the virgin soil which Richardson has tilled has often yielded him large and rich returns. Of the uselessness of our legions of words to be found in dictionaries, a writer of the day observes: