ecial
temperament. Extravagant drollery can be mated to an aptitude for
geometry or a passion for analysis as well as to a love of pictures or
of horses.

But the parentage of 'Alice in Wonderland' and its fellows is closer
to their creator's intellectual being even than this. A very slight
glance at their matter and mechanism shows that they are the work of
one trained to use words with the finest precision, to teach others to
use them so, to criticize keenly any inconsistency or slovenliness in
their use, and to mock mercilessly any vagueness or incoherence in
thought or diction. The fantastic framework and inconsequent scenes of
these wonder-stories mask from the popular view the qualities which
give them their superlative rank and enduring charm.

The mere machinery, ingenious and amusing as it is, would not
entertain beyond a single reading; it can be and has often been
imitated, along with the incarnated nursery rhymes and old saws. Yet
these grotesque chimeras, under Lewis Carroll's touch, are as living
to us as any characters in Dickens or the 'Ingoldsby Legends,' and
even more so to the elders than the children. Who does not know and
delight in the King and Queen and Knave of Hearts, the elegant White
Rabbit and the conceited and monosyllabic Caterpillar, the Cheshire
Cat and the Mock-Turtle, the March Hare and the Hatter and the
Dormouse; or the chess White King and the Queens and the White Knight,
the Walrus and the Carpenter, of Looking-Glass Land?

The very genesis of many of these is the logical analysis of a popular
comparison into sober fact, as "grinning like a Cheshire cat," "mad as
a hatter" or "March hare," "sleeping like a dormouse," etc.; and a
large part of their wit and fun consists in plays on ambiguous terms
in current use, like the classic "jam every other day," "French,
music, and washing," "The name of the song is called--" or in parodies
on familiar verses (or on the spirit of ballads rather than the
wording, as in 'Jabberwocky'), or in heaps of versified
_non-sequiturs_, like the exquisite "poem" read at the trial of the
Knave of Hearts. The analyst and the logician is as patent in 'Alice'
as in the class lectures the author gave or the technical works he has
issued; only turning his criticism and his _reductiones ad absurdum_
into bases for witty fooling instead of serious lessons or didactic
works. Hence, while his wonder-books are nominally for children, and
please the children thro