first made her aware of the availability of her own venom. She foisted her
prim and narrow moral code upon the commonplace adventures of a priggish
little boy and his companions; and straightway the whole dreary and
disastrous army of sectarians and dogmatists took up the cry, and have
been ringing the lugubrious changes on it ever since. There is really no
estimating the mortal wrong that has been done to childhood by Maria
Edgeworth's "Frank" and "The Parent's Assistant"; and, for my part, I
derive a melancholy joy in availing myself of this opportunity to express
my sense of my personal share in the injury. I believe that my affection
for the human race is as genuine as the average; but I am sure it would
have been greater had Miss Edgeworth never been born; and were I to come
across any philosophical system whereby I could persuade myself that she
belonged to some other order of beings than the human, I should be
strongly tempted to embrace that system on that ground alone.

After what has been advanced in the preceding pages, it does not need that
I should state how earnestly I deprecate the kind of literary food which
we are now furnishing to the coming generation in such sinister abundance.
I am sure it is written and published with good and honorable motives; but
at the very best it can only do no harm. Moreover, however well
intentioned, it is bad as literature; it is poorly conceived and written,
and, what is worse, it is saturated with affectation. For an impression
prevails that one needs to talk down to children;--to keep them constantly
reminded that they are innocent, ignorant little things, whose consuming
wish it is to be good and go to Sunday-school, and who will be all
gratitude and docility to whomsoever provides them with the latest fashion
of moral sugarplums; whereas, so far as my experience and information
goes, children are the most formidable literary critics in the world.
Matthew Arnold himself has not so sure an instinct for what is sound and
good in a book as any intelligent little boy or girl of eight years old.