are the stories of Oliver Optic?
Where is Jacob Abbott's John Gay; or Work for Boys? Even Paul and
Virginia have vanished, taking with them the philosophic Rasselas and
even the pretty story of Undine. Nothing of that list of thirty titles
is now well remembered except Cooper's Leatherstocking and Jane
Andrews's Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball That Floats
in the Air, a book which has been translated into the languages of
remote nations of the globe, I myself having seen the Chinese and
Japanese versions. Thus irregular is the award of time and we must
accept it. Meanwhile this new book is organized on a better plan than
any dreamed of at that former period, the books being arranged not
merely by classes alone, but according to the age of the proposed
readers and stretching in regular order from two years old until
fourteen. The whole number of books being very large, there is no
overdue limitation, and this forms the simple but magical method of
reaching every variety of childish mind.

Thus excellent have been the changes: yet it is curious to (p. xiii)
observe on closer study that the two classes of books which represent
the two extremes among the childish readers--Mother Hubbard and
Shakespeare--may still be said to be the opposite poles between which
the whole world of juvenile literature hangs suspended. A child needs
to be supplied with a proper diet of fancy as well as of fact; and of
fact as well as fancy. He is usually so constituted that if he were to
find a fairy every morning in his bread and milk at breakfast, it
would not very much surprise him; while yet his appetite for the
substantial food remains the same. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
seem nowhere very strange to him, while Chaucer and Spenser need only
to be simply told, while Dana's Two Years Before the Mast and Hughes's
Tom Brown's School Days at Rugby hold their own as well as Jack and
the Bean-Stalk. Grown up people have their prejudices, but children
have few or none. A pound of feathers and a pound of lead will usually
be found to weigh the same in their scales. Nay, we, their
grandparents, know by experience that there may be early cadences in
their ears which may last all their lives. For instance, Caroline (p. xiv)
Fry's Listener would now scarcely find a reader in any group of
children, yet there is one passage in the book--one which forms the
close of some beggar's story about "Never more beholding Margaret
Som