xiii)
observe on closer study that the two classes of books which represent
the two extremes among the childish readers--Mother Hubbard and
Shakespeare--may still be said to be the opposite poles between which
the whole world of juvenile literature hangs suspended. A child needs
to be supplied with a proper diet of fancy as well as of fact; and of
fact as well as fancy. He is usually so constituted that if he were to
find a fairy every morning in his bread and milk at breakfast, it
would not very much surprise him; while yet his appetite for the
substantial food remains the same. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
seem nowhere very strange to him, while Chaucer and Spenser need only
to be simply told, while Dana's Two Years Before the Mast and Hughes's
Tom Brown's School Days at Rugby hold their own as well as Jack and
the Bean-Stalk. Grown up people have their prejudices, but children
have few or none. A pound of feathers and a pound of lead will usually
be found to weigh the same in their scales. Nay, we, their
grandparents, know by experience that there may be early cadences in
their ears which may last all their lives. For instance, Caroline (p. xiv)
Fry's Listener would now scarcely find a reader in any group of
children, yet there is one passage in the book--one which forms the
close of some beggar's story about "Never more beholding Margaret
Somebody and her sunburnt child"--which would probably bring tears to
the present writer's eyes today, although he has not seen the book
since he was ten years of age.
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