y American picture-book. Indeed,
with the exception of this and an occasional illustration in some
otherwise English reproduction, all the American publishers at this time
seem to have modelled their wares for small children after those of two
large London firms, J. Harris, successor to Newbery, and William Darton.

To Darton, the author of "Little Truths," the children were indebted for
a serious attempt to improve the character of toy-books. A copper-plate
engraver by profession, Darton's attention was drawn to the scarcity of
books for children by the discovery that there was not much written for
them that was worth illustrating. Like Newbery, he set about to make
books himself, and with John Harvey, also an engraver, he set up in
Grace Church Street an establishment for printing and publishing, from
which he supplied, to a great extent, the juvenile books closely
imitated by American printers. Besides his own compositions, he was very
alert to encourage promising authors, and through him the famous verses
of Jane and Ann Taylor were brought into notice. "Original Poems," and
"Rhymes for the Nursery," by these sisters, were to the old-time child
what Stevenson's "Child's Garden of Verses" is to the modern nursery.
Darton and Harvey paid ten pounds for the first series of "Original
Poems," and fifteen pounds for the second; while "Rhymes for the
Nursery" brought to its authors the unusual sum of twenty pounds. The
Taylors were the originators of that long series of verses for infants
which "My Sister" and "My Governess" strove to surpass but never in any
way equalled, although they apparently met with a fair sale in America.

[Illustration: _Little Nancy_]

Enterprising American booksellers also copied the new ways of
advertising juvenile books. An instance of this is afforded by Johnson
and Warner of Philadelphia, who apparently succeeded Jacob and Benjamin
Johnson, and had, by eighteen hundred and ten, branch shops in Richmond,
Virginia, and Lexington, Kentucky. They advertised their "neatly
executed books of amusement" in book notes in the "Young Gentlemen and
Ladies' Magazine," by means of digressions from the thread of their
stories, and sometimes by inserting as frontispiece a rhyme taken from
one used by John Harris of St. Paul's Churchyard:

"At JO---- store in Market Street
A sure reward good children meet.
In coming home the other day
I heard a little master say
For ev'ry three-pence