sibility of arresting this force of evil? Think what you would have
been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in
childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history. Hang
them! I mean the cursed Barbauld crew, those blights and blasts of all
that is human in man and child."[142-A]

To Lamb's extremely sensitive nature, the vanished hand of the literary
man of Grub Street could not be replaced by Mrs. Barbauld's wish to
instruct by using simple language. It is possible that he did her some
injustice. Yet a retrospective glance over the story-book literature
evolved since Newbery's juvenile library was produced, shows little that
was not poor in quality and untrue to life. Therefore, it is no wonder
that Lamb should have cried out against the sore evil which had "beset a
child's mind." All the poetry of life, all the imaginative powers of a
child, Mrs. Barbauld, Mrs. Trimmer, and Mr. Day ignored; and Newbery in
his way, and the old ballads in their way, had appealed to both.

In both countries the passion for knowledge resulted in this curious
literature of amusement. In England books were written; in America they
were reprinted, until a religious revival left in its wake the series
of morbid and educational tales which the desire to write original
stories for American children produced.

FOOTNOTES:

[123-A] Miss Hewins, _Atlantic Monthly_, vol. lxi, p. 112.

[123-B] Brynberg. Wilmington, 1796.

[128-A] Miss Repplier, _Atlantic Monthly_, vol. lvii, p. 509.

[141-A] Hill, _Johnsonian Miscellany_, vol. i, p. 157.

[141-B] _Ibid._

[142-A] Welsh, _Introduction to Goody Two Shoes_, p. x.

CHAPTER VI

1800-1825

Her morals then the Matron read,
Studious to teach her Children dear,
And they by love or Duty led,
With Pleasure read.
_A Mother's Remarks_,
Philadelphia, 1810

Mama! see what a pretty book
At Day's papa has bought,
That I may at its pictures look,
And by its words be taught.

CHAPTER VI

1800-1825

_Toy-Books in the Early Nineteenth Century_

On the 23d of December, 1823, there appeared anonymously in the "Troy
(New York) Sentinel," a Christmas ballad entitled "A Visit from St.
Nicholas." This rhymed story of Santa Claus and his reindeer, written
one year before its publication by Clement Clarke Moore for his own
family, marks the appearance of a truly original story