ales to My Daughter_. I include it
for its quaint _naivete_, and also for its lesson of gratitude and
minute thoughtfulness. But it was a sad oversight (not too explicable in
a French romance) not to make Augustus marry the Green Hat.

I included 'Amendment,' from _The Little Prisoners; or, Passion and
Patience_, 1828, because its idea is an attractive one. There is always
something engaging, not by any means only to the youthful mind, in the
idea of a complete change in the conditions and surroundings of one's
life. That is why so many of us want to be gipsies. The book is
anonymous.

'Scourhill's Adventure' is from an amusing book called _The Academy_,
which, for all I know, is the first real boy's school-book ever written.
Its companion is _The Rector_, and together they describe, with no
little spirit and reasonableness, a school a hundred years ago, with all
the escapades and errors of the boys and all the homilies of the
schoolmaster. I like the episode of Scourhill as well as any because of
the pleasant interior which it contains--Scourhill's home, with the
noisy old gentlemen, a little like a scene in Marryat. The books are not
worth reprinting, in the way that _Lady Anne_ (to which we draw near) is
worth reprinting; but they are worth looking at if they ever chance to
fall one's way.

We come next to 'The Journal' from _Juvenile Anecdotes founded on Facts;
Collected for the Amusement of Children_, 1803, by Priscilla Wakefield.
A hundred years ago Mrs. Wakefield's books for the nursery (which, if
its literature is a guide, was in those days less of a nursery than a
conventicle) were in every shop. She poured them forth--little rushing
streams of didacticism. The present work, from which, for its
quaintness, I have chosen 'The Journal,' is a kind of Ann and Jane
Taylor in very obvious prose. Little girls having spent their
half-crowns on themselves, at once meet members of the destitute class,
and, having nothing to give them, are plunged into remorse; little boys
creeping into the larder to steal jam, eat soft soap by mistake and
never are greedy again; and so forth. All the conventional images and
morals are employed. The whole book is one long and emphatic division of
sheep from goats. 'The Journal' is not perhaps exciting, but it reflects
the quieter family life of a century ago, and incidentally portrays the
thorough governess of that day.

Priscilla Wakefield was a Quaker, the great-granddaughter on her