eir wives and
children, these judges and prophets, these kings and priests, are by no
means ideals of virtue in the notion of our modern lifeless morality,
which would smooth out of its pattern-stories for the "dear children"
everything that is hard and uncouth. For the very reason that the
shadow-side is not wanting here, and that we find envy, vanity, evil
desire, ingratitude, craftiness, and deceit, among these fathers of the
race and leaders of "God's chosen people," have these stories so great
an educational value. Adam, Cain, Abraham, Joseph, Samson, and David,
have justly become as truly world-historical types as Achilles and
Patroclus, Agamemnon and Iphigenia, Hector and Andromache, Ulysses and
Penelope.--

Sec. 95. There may be produced also, out of the simplest and most primitive
phases of different epochs of culture of one and the same people,
stories which answer to the imagination of children, and represent to
them the characteristic features of the past of their people.

--The Germans possess such a collection of their stories in their
popular books of the "Horny Sigfried," of the "Heymon Children," of
"Beautiful _Magelone_," "Fortunatus," "The Wandering Jew," "Faust," "The
Adventurous Simplicissimus," "The _Schildbuerger_," "The Island of
Felsenburg," "Lienhard and Gertrude," &c. Also, the art works of the
great masters which possess national significance must be spoken of
here, as the Don Quixote of Cervantes.--

Sec. 96. The most general form in which the childish imagination finds
exercise is that of fairy-tales; but Education must take care that it
has these in their proper shape as national productions, and that they
are not of the morbid kind which poetry so often gives us in this
species of literature, and which not seldom degenerate to sentimental
caricatures and silliness.

--The East Indian stories are most excellent because they have their
origin with a childlike people who live wholly in the imagination. By
means of the Arabian filtration, which took place in Cairo in the
flourishing period of the Egyptian caliphs, all that was too
characteristically Indian was excluded, and they were made in the "Tales
of Scheherezade," a book for all peoples, with whose far-reaching power
in child-literature, the local stories of a race, as e.g. Grimm's
admirable ones of German tradition, cannot compare. Fairy-tales made to
order, as we often see them, with a mediaeval Catholic tendency, or very
moral a