marry as in almost every other novelette. This
difference, of course, prevents the story from being a typical one of
its period, but it is, nevertheless, a worthy forerunner of those tales
of the nineteenth century in which an effort was made to write about
incidents in a child's life, and to avoid the biographical tendency.

Before leaving the books of the eighteenth century, one tale must be
mentioned because it contains the germ of the idea which has developed
into Mr. George's "Junior Republic." It was called "Juvenile Trials for
Robbing Orchards, Telling Tales and other Heinous Offenses." "This,"
said Dr. Aikin--Mrs. Barbauld's brother and collaborator in "Evenings at
Home"--"is a very pleasing and ingenious little Work, in which a Court
of Justice is supposed to be instituted in a school, composed of the
Scholars themselves, for the purpose of trying offenses committed at
School." In "Trial the First" Master Tommy Tell-Truth charges Billy
Prattle with robbing an orchard. The jury, after hearing Billy express
his contrition for his act, brings in a verdict of guilty; but the judge
pardons the culprit because of his repentant frame of mind. Miss Delia,
the offender in case _Number Two_, does not escape so lightly. Miss
Stirling charges her with raising contention and strife among her
school-fellows over a piece of angelica, "whereby," say her prosecutors,
"one had her favorite cap torn to pieces, and her hair which had been
that day nicely dressed, pulled all about her shoulders; another had her
sack torn down the middle; a third had a fine flowered apron of her own
working, reduced to rags; a fourth was wounded by a pelick, or scratch
of her antagonist, and in short, there was hardly one among them who had
not some mark to shew of having been concerned in this unfortunate
affair." That the good Dr. Aikin approved of the punishment decreed, we
are sure. The little prisoner was condemned to pass three days in her
room, as just penalty for such "indelicate" behaviour.

By the close of the century Miss Edgeworth was beginning to supersede
Mrs. Barbauld in England; but in America the taste in juvenile reading
was still satisfied with the older writer's little Charles, as the
correct model for children's deportment, and with Giles Gingerbread as
the exemplary student. The child's lessons had passed from "Be good or
you will go to Hell" to "Be good and you will be rich;" or, with the
Puritan element still so largely pred