man on the gallows, "that," said
the ingenuous gentleman, "they may love each other with a perfect and
heavenly love." As the children gazed upon the dreadful object the
tender father described in detail its every phase, and ended by kneeling
in prayer. The story of Evelyn in the third chapter was written as the
result of a present of books from an American _Universalist_, whose
doctrines Mrs. Sherwood thought likely to be pernicious to children and
should be controverted as soon as possible. Later, other things
emanating from America were considered injurious to children, but this
seems to be the first indication that American ideas were noticed in
English juvenile literature.

But all this lady's tales were not so lugubrious, and many were immense
favorites. Children were even named for the hero of the "Little
Millenium Boy." Publishers frequently sent her orders for books to be
"written to cuts," and the "Busy Bee," the "Errand Boy," and the "Rose"
were some of the results of this method of supplying the demand for her
work. Naturally, Mrs. Sherwood, like Miss Edgeworth, had many imitators,
but if we could believe the incidents related as true to life, parents
would seem to have been either very indifferent to their children or
forever suspicious of them. In Newbery's time it had been thought no sin
to wear fine buckled shoes, to be genteelly dressed with a wide
"ribband;" but now the vain child was one who wore a white frock with
pink sash, towards whom the finger of scorn was pointed, and from whom
the moral was unfailingly drawn. Vanity was, apparently, an unpardonable
sin, as when in a "Moral Tale,"

"Mamma observed the rising lass
By stealth retiring to the glass
To practise little arts unseen
In the true genius of thirteen."

The constant effort to draw a lesson from every action sometimes led to
overstepping the bounds of truth by the parents themselves, as for
example in a similar instance of love for a mirror. "What is this I see,
Harriet?" asked a mother in "Emulation." "Is that the way you employ
your precious time? I am no longer surprised at the alteration in your
looks of late, that you have appeared so sickly, have lost your
complexion; in short I have twenty times been on the point of asking you
if you are ill. You look shockingly, child."

"I am very well, Mamma, indeed," cried Harriet, quite alarmed.

"Impossible, my dear, you can never look well, while you follow such an
unwho