them.  Style in the hands of some writers is like war-paint to the savage—­of no perceptible value unless it is laid on thick.  Our little ones begin too often on cheap and tawdry stories in one or two syllables, where pictures in primary colors try their best to atone for lack of matter.  Then they enter on a prolonged series of children’s books, some of them written by people who have neither the intelligence nor the literary skill to write for a more critical audience; on the same basis of reasoning which puts the young and inexperienced teachers into the lowest grades, where the mind ought to be formed, and assigns to the more practiced the simpler task of informing the already partially formed (or deformed) mind.

There has never been such conscientious, intelligent, and purposeful work done for children as in the last ten years; and if an overwhelming flood of trash has been poured into our laps along with the better things, we must accept the inevitable.  The legends, myths, and fables of the world, as well as its history and romance, are being brought within reach of young readers by writers of wide knowledge and trained skill.

Knowing, then, as we do, the dangers and obstacles in the way, and realizing the innumerable inspirations which the best thought gives to us, can we not so direct the reading of our children that our older boys and girls shall not be so exclusively modern in their tastes; so that they may be inclined to take a little less Mr. Saltus, a little more Shakespeare, temper their devotion to Mr. Kipling by small doses of Dante, forsake “The Duchess” for a dip into Thackeray, and use Hawthorne as a safe and agreeable antidote to Mr. Haggard?  We need not despair of the child who does not care to read, for books are not the only means of culture; but they are a very great means when the mind is really stimulated, and not simply padded with them.

Mr. Frederic Harrison says:  “Books are no more education than laws are virtue.  Of all men, perhaps the book-lover needs most to be reminded that man’s business here is to know for the sake of living, not to live for the sake of knowing.”

But a child who has no taste for reading, who is utterly incapable of losing himself in a printed page, quite unable to forget his childish griefs,

    “And plunge,
  Soul forward, headlong into a book’s profound,
  Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth,”

—­such a child is to be pitied as missing one of the chief joys of life.  Such a child has no dear old book-friendships to look back upon.  He has no sweet associations with certain musty covers and time-worn pages; no sacred memories of quiet moments when a new love of goodness, a new throb of generosity, a new sense of humanity, were born in the ardent young soul; born when we had turned the last page of some well-thumbed volume and pressed our tear-stained childish cheek against the window pane, when it was growing