instruction and public exercises in various departments of learning; but
it has few or no books, beyond the class text-books which are used in
these instructions. The library, on the other hand, is a silent school of
learning, free to all, and supplying a wide range of information, in
books adapted to every age. It thus supplements, and in proportion to the
extent and judicious choice of its collections, helps to complete that
education, which the school falls short of. In this view, we see the
great importance of making sure that the public library has not only a
full supply of the best books in every field, avoiding (as previously
urged) the bad or the inferior ones, but also that it has the best
juvenile and elementary literature in ample supply. This subject of
reading for the young has of late years come into unprecedented
prominence. Formerly, and even up to the middle of our century, very
slight attention was paid to it, either by authors or readers. Whole
generations had been brought up on the New England Primer, with its
grotesque wood-cuts, and antique theology in prose and verse, with a few
moral narratives in addition, as solemn as a meeting-house, like the
"Dairyman's Daughter," the "History of Sandford and Merton," or "The
Shepherd of Salisbury Plain." Very dreary and melancholy do such books
appear to the frequenters of our modern libraries, filled as they now are
with thousands of volumes of lively and entertaining juvenile books.

The transition from the old to the new in this class of literature was
through the Sunday-school and religious tract society books, professedly
adapted to the young. While some of these had enough of interest to be
fairly readable, if one had no other resource, the mass were irredeemably
stale and poor. The mawkishness of the sentiment was only surpassed by
the feebleness of the style. At last, weary of the goody-goody and
artificial school of juvenile books, which had been produced for
generations, until a surfeit of it led to something like a nausea in the
public mind, there came a new type of writers for the young, who at least
began to speak the language of reason. The dry bones took on some
semblance of life and of human nature, and boys and girls were painted as
real boys and genuine girls, instead of lifeless dolls and manikins. The
reformation went on, until we now have a world of books for the young to
choose from, very many of which are fresh and entertaining.

But