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Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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Untitled Article
For this reason , among others , we have often been tempted to regret that children are allowed , in our day , so little time for exploring more manly books , and that lhe very desire to do so is stifled in its rise by the constant succession of abridgments , compilations , and juvenile periodicals * Miss
Edgeworth deserves our thanks for having taken every opportunity of apprizing her little readers that there are large books in which they may find things which will delight and instruct them ; but a considerable share of the spirit of enterprising curiosity is required to lead a child from his own wellfilled shelves , groaning with elegant Lilliputian literature , to papa ' s plainer and more heavy-looking library .
How much beauty is there in Mrs . Barbauld ' s Lessons ! And yet we never can cease to regret that some few objectionable passages in them were not struck out before the hand that wrote them first was cold in the grave . Why should the little naughty boy who was cruel to his bird be denied a pretty name ? Or why should goodness be connected with a name at all ? And why resort to the improbable retributive justice recorded in the sequel ? These things are vexatious , as coupled with such excellence .
No veneration for an individual can ever reconcile us to superficial and faulty motives being inculcated on children . Miss Edgeworth too—wise , quick , and penetrating , as she is—why should she ever have contemplated dispensing a school prize * " to the most amiable" ? Can any thing be less amiable than the spirit in which a number of school-girls would be likely to contend for such a reward ? Of writers for young people , Miss Aikin seems to us to deserve great gratitude . There is much negative as
well as positive good in what she has done for them , and we trust this will seem to the reader , as it does to ourselves , to involve high praise . There are , indeed , numbers of books for children which contain useful and pleasing things , but the great , the lasting difficulty is , to meet with one that does no harm ; and in saying this , we have an eye as much to manner as matter . What we like in Miss Aikin ' s Lesson Book for the Junior Classes , f is its scrupulous correctness as to facts of nature or real life , combined with a rare
abstinence , in most cases , from advice-giving and moral-making , its perfect good taste , a spirit of good temper , a hearty interest in the beauties of creation , and on the harmony of the human heart with the fair-proportioned whole . She has not entered deeply into the life of children , but it is better to go but a little way and do it well , than to make large professions and fail .
In her own department she is eminently happy ; the execution , indeed , of what she does attempt is so excellent as often to have made us regret that her essays have not been more numerous : they might fill up a blank in our literature , and distance alike some of our absurdly romantic tales , and our dull moralities , while they would in no way interfere with the province of direct religious instruction .
In noticing children ' s religious books , how difficult to steer a just course ! Practically , we have by no means that extreme horror of tales of the Calvinistic school which sways many of our Unitarian brethren , though to very little children we certainly would not give them . We do not think the chances of their doing an injury to . the . mind of a young person are to be named with the dangers connected with errors such as those we have pointed
* Parents' Assi&tant— The Bracelets . " f " A Lesson Book for the Junior Classes . By Lucy Aikin . " Hunter . We wish it had a prettier tit ^ . The quie t pleasantry of " the Cuckoo and Magpie , " and the very pleasing piece entitled " the Pearl of Price , " deserved this .
Untitled Article
50 Children * 11 BoaAs .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Jan. 2, 1831, page 50, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2593/page/50/
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