among the list of books "Printed in America." Its title,
"The Famous Tommy Thumb's Little Story-Book: Containing his Life and
Adventures," has rather a familiar sound, but its contents would not now
be allowed upon any nursery table. Since the days of the Anglo-Saxons,
Tom Thumb's adventures have been told and retold; each generation has
given to the rising generation the version thought proper for the ears
of children. In Boyle's edition this method resulted in realism pushed
to the extreme; but it is not to be denied that the yellowed pages
contain the wondrous adventures and hairbreadth escapes so dear to the
small boy of all time. The thrilling incidents were further enlivened,
moreover, by cuts called by the printer "_curious_" in the sense of very
fine: and _curious_ they are to-day because of the crudeness of their
execution and the coarseness of their design. Nevertheless, the
grotesque character of the illustrations was altogether effective in
impressing upon the reader the doughty deeds of his old friend, Tom
Thumb. The book itself shows marks of its popularity, and of the hard
usage to which it was subjected by its happy owner, who was not critical
of the editor's freedom of speech.

The coarseness permitted in a nursery favorite makes it sufficiently
clear that the standard for the ideal toy-book of the eighteenth century
is no gauge for that of the twentieth. Child-life differed in many
particulars, as Mr. Julian Hawthorne pointed out some years ago, when he
wrote that the children of the eighteenth century "were urged to grow up
almost before they were short-coated." We must bear this in mind in
turning to another class of books popular with adult and child alike in
both England and America before and for some years after the Revolution.

This was the period when the novel in the hands of Richardson, Fielding,
and Smollett was assuming hitherto unsuspected possibilities. Allusion
must be made to some of the characteristics of their work, since their
style undoubtedly affected juvenile reading and the tales written for
children.

Taking for the sake of convenience the novels of the earliest of this
group of men, Samuel Richardson, as a starting-point, we find in Pamela
and Mr. Lovelace types of character that merge from the Puritanical
concrete examples of virtue and vice into a psychological attempt to
depict the emotion and feeling preceding every act of heroine and
villain. Through every stage of the s