some few years since, when the present reaction in favour of such literary purveyors as the Brothers Grimm had not yet set in, and childhood seemed in post-haste to be turned into a Useful Knowledge Society—a corporation without imagination, fancy, poetry, faith, soul, or spirit—a joint-stock company of old heads on young shoulders, and tiny bosoms without hearts in them. Then it was that Charles Lamb piteously said, in one of his nonpareil letters, "Goody Two Shoes is almost out of print. Mrs. Barbauld's stuff has banished all the old classics of the nursery; and the shopman at Newbery's[1] hardly deigned to reach them off an old exploded corner of a shelf, when Mary asked for them.[2] Mrs. B.'s and Mrs. Trimmer's nonsense lay in piles about. Knowledge insignificant and vapid as Mrs. B.'s books convey, it seems, must come to a child in the shape of knowledge, and his empty noddle must be turned with conceit of his own powers when he has learnt that a horse is an animal, and Billy is better than a horse, and such like; instead of that beautiful interest in wild tales, which made the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger than a child." And there follows Lamb's argumentum ad hominem S. T. C, which, remembering what manner of man S. T. C. was, we read very feelingly: "Think of what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!" Ach Himmel! what had then become of the "Ancient Mariner," and "Christabel," and all the others, best reliques of the noticeable man with large grey eyes!
Why, sir, it may be retorted, he might then have become a cosy, comfortable, substantial, practical man; and S. T. C. might have been as well known and respected on 'Change as £ s. d. itself. That pampered imagination was the ruin of him.
Yes, comfortable and well-to-do-man of business! in your sense it was. But in another sense,[3] for which he is dear, and by which only
- ↑ Whither Charles and "Bridget" had just wended their way, to buy some nursery classics for little Hartley Coleridge. He, we hope, retained, as he certainly prized and loved them, to the last.
- ↑ Had Charles asked for them, we presume this shopman would have construed his stutter into an inability, for very shame, to make inquiries for anything so frivolous and out of date.
- ↑ Says Wordsworth to Coleridge (just as Lamb said, ut suprà),
"Where had we been, we two, beloved friend!" &c.,
if reared on the modern mannikin system? Wordsworth "pours out thanks with uplifted heart, that he was reared safe from an evil which these days have laid upon the children of the land, a pest that might have dried him up, body and soul." See, in extenso, the noble Fifth Book of the "Prelude"—on the text:
"Oh! give us once again the wishing cap
Of Fortunatus, and the invisible coat
Of Jack the Giant-killer, Robin Hood,
And Sabra in the forest with St George!
The child whose love is here, at least doth reap
One precious gain, that he forgets himself."
for the tale; And the result was, that it "sweetened their early days, delighted them with its thousand varying forms and metamorphoses, and flew over every house and hut, over every castle and palace." But furthermore, the tale was not limited, in its mission, to the children. "Its nature was such, that even those of maturer age found pleasure in it, provided only that in their riper years they possessed something which they had brought with them from the garden of childhood—a child-like simplicity of heart." Without which, we recommend no one to read Messrs. Hawthorne and Benjamin Thorpe.
