annot very well tell why it is that the good
old histories and tales, which used to be given to young people for
their amusement and instruction, as soon as they could read, have of
late years gone quite out of fashion in this country. In former days
there was a worthy English bookseller, one Mr. Newbery, who used to
print thousands of nice little volumes of such stories, which, as he
solemnly declared in print in the books themselves, he gave away to all
little boys and girls, charging them only a sixpenny for the gold
covers. These of course no one could be so unreasonable as to wish him
to furnish at his own expense.... Yet in the last generation, American
boys and girls (the fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers
of the present generation) were not wholly dependent upon Mr. Newbery of
St. Paul's church-yard, though they knew him well and loved him much.
The great Benjamin Franklin, when a printer in Philadelphia, did not
disdain to print divers of Newbery's books adorned with cuts in the
likeness of his, though it must be confessed somewhat inferior.[216-B]
Yet rude as they were, they were probably the first things in the way of
pictures that West and Copley ever beheld, and so instilled into those
future painters, the rudiments of that art by which they afterwards
became so eminent themselves, and conferred such honour upon their
native country. In somewhat later time there were the worthy Hugh Gaine,
at the Sign of the Bible and Crown in Pearl street, and the patriotic
Samuel Loudon, and the genuine and unadulterated New Yorker, Evert
Duyckinck, besides others in Boston and Philadelphia, who trod in the
steps of Newbery, and supplied the infant mind with its first and
sweetest literary food. The munificent Newbery, and the pious and loyal
Hugh Gaine, and the patriotic Samuel Loudon are departed. Banks now
abound and brokers swarm where Loudon erst printed, and many millions
worth of silk and woolen goods are every year sold where Gaine vended
his big Bibles and his little story-books. They are all gone; the
glittering covers and their more brilliant contents, the tales of wonder
and enchantment, the father's best reward for merit, the good
grandmother's most prized presents. They are gone--the cheap delight of
childhood, the unbought grace of boyhood, the dearest, freshest, and
most unfading recollections of maturer life. They are gone--and in their
stead has succeeded a swarm of geological catechisms, e