Page:A happy half-century and other essays.djvu/164

 the immature pleasures of childhood. "We have in our domestic plan several of these artificial divisions of life. These little celebrations are eras that we use as marking-posts from which we set out on some new course."

Yet the "gilt books," so ruthlessly discarded at eight years of age, were not all of an infantile character. For half a century these famous little volumes, bound in Dutch gilt paper—whence their name—found their way into every English nursery, and provided amusement and instruction for every English child. They varied from the "histories" of Goody Two-Shoes and Miss Sally Spellwell to the "histories" of Tom Jones and Clarissa Harlowe, "abridged for the amusement of youth"; and from "The Seven Champions of Christendom" to "The First Principles of Religion, and the Existence of a Deity; Explained in a Series of Conversations, Adapted to the Capacity of the Infant Mind." The capacity of the infant mind at the close of the eighteenth century must have been something very different from the capacity of the infant mind to-day. In a gilt-book dialogue (1792) I find a father