river. The principal humorist frightens the child into convulsions. The
incident is the success of the day, and is obviously intended to have
some kind of reflex action in amusing the reader. In Dickens's maturer
books the burlesque little girl imitates her mother's illusory fainting-
fits.

Our glimpses of children in the fugitive pages of that day are grotesque.
A little girl in _Punch_ improves on the talk of her dowdy mother with
the maids. An inordinate baby stares; a little boy flies, hideous, from
some hideous terror.




AUTHORSHIP


Authorship prevails in nurseries--at least in some nurseries. In many it
is probably a fitful game, and since the days of the Brontes there has
not been a large family without its magazine. The weak point of all this
literature is its commonplace. The child's effort is to write something
as much like as possible to the tedious books that are read to him; he is
apt to be fluent and foolish. If a child simple enough to imitate were
also simple enough not to imitate he might write nursery magazines that
would not bore us.

As it is, there is sometimes nothing but the fresh and courageous
spelling to make his stories go. "He," however, is hardly the pronoun.
The girls are the more active authors, and the more prosaic. What they
would write had they never read things written for them by the dull, it