sometimes clearly, sometimes dimly, the good or bad fashions that have
shared the successive periods of literary history, like a child who
unconsciously reproduces a parent's foibles or excellences.

It is to England, then, that we must look to find the conditions out of
which grew the necessity for this modern invention--the story-book.

The love of stories has been the splendid birthright of every child in
all ages and in all lands. "Stories," wrote Thackeray,--"stories exist
everywhere; there is no calculating the distance through which the
stories have come to us, the number of languages through which they have
been filtered, or the centuries during which they have been told. Many
of them have been narrated almost in their present shape for thousands
of years to the little copper-coloured Sanscrit children, listening to
their mothers under the palm-trees by the banks of the yellow
Jumna--their Brahmin mother, who softly narrated them through the ring
in her nose. The very same tale has been heard by the Northern Vikings
as they lay on their shields on deck; and the Arabs couched under the
stars on the Syrian plains when their flocks were gathered in, and their
mares were picketed by the tents." This picturesque description leads
exactly to the point to be emphasized: that children shared in the
simple tales of their people as long as those tales retained their
freshness and simplicity; but when, as in England in the eighteenth
century, the literature lost these qualities and became artificial,
critical, and even skeptical, it lost its charm for the little ones and
they no longer cared to listen to it.

Fashion and taste were then alike absorbed in the works of Dryden, Pope,
Addison, Steele, and Swift, and the novels from the pens of Richardson,
Fielding, and Smollett had begun to claim and to hold the attention of