Turkey, the mines of Golconda, the streets of Bagdad, thieves, travelers, governesses, natural philosophy, and fashionable life were all laid under contribution, and brought interest and adventure to our humdrum nursery corner."[1]
And have these bright and varied pictures, "these immortal tales," as Mr. Matthew Arnold termed them, lost their power to charm, that they are banished from our modern nursery corners; or is it because their didactic purpose is too thinly veiled, or—as I have sometimes fancied—because their authoress took so moderate a view of children's functions and importance? If we place Miss Edgeworth's and Miss Alcott's stories side by side, we shall see that the contrast between them lies not so much in the expected dissimilarity of style and incident as in the utterly different standpoint from which their writers regard the aspirations and responsibilities of childhood. Take, for instance, Miss Edgeworth's Rosamond and Miss Alcott's Eight Cousins, both of them books purporting to show the gradual development of a little girl's character under kindly and stimulating influences. Rosamond,
