basis of a child's mental and religious training. Later, during and
after the Crusades, the stories of war and the mysteries of the East
increased the stock in trade for the homes of Europe; but still the
horizon remained a narrow one. Even the invention of printing did not
bring to the young as many direct advantages as would naturally be
expected. To-day, when Christian missionaries set up a printing press in
some distant island of the sea, the first books which they print in the
vernacular are almost invariably those parts of the Bible, such as the
Gospels and the stories of Genesis, which most appeal to the young, and,
what is of special importance, they have the young directly and mainly
in mind in their publishing work. This was not true a few centuries ago.
The presses were, perhaps naturally and inevitably, almost exclusively
occupied with books for the learned world. To be sure, the Legenda
Aurea, of which I shall speak later, although not intended primarily for
children, proved a great boon to them. So did the Chap Books of England.
But it was not until the middle of the eighteenth century, when John
Newbery set up his book shop at St. Paul's Churchyard, London, that any
special attention was given by printers to the publication, in
attractive form, of juvenile books. Newbery's children's books made him
famous in his day, but the world seems to have forgotten him. Yet he
deserves a monument along with Æsop, and La Fontaine, and Kate
Greenaway, and Andersen, and Scott and Henty, and all the other greater
and lesser lights who have done so much to gladden the heart and enlarge
the mind of childhood and youth.

But from Newbery's day to this year of our Lord nineteen hundred and
three is a very long jump in what we may call the evolution of juvenile
literature, for the preparation of reading matter for young people seems
now almost to have reached its climax. There is one field, however, and
that the one which this volume tries to cover, which strangely enough