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 THE HOME TREASURY OF BOOKS, PICTURES, TOYS, ETC. FELIX SUMMERLY.

HE character of most Children's Books published during the last quarter of a century is fairly typified in the name of Peter Parley, which the writers of some hundreds of them have assumed. The books themselves have been addressed after a narrow fashion almost entirely to the cultivation of the understanding of children. The many tales sung or said from time immemorial, which appealed to the other, and certainly not less important elements of a little child's mind, its fancy, imagination, sympathies, affections, are almost all gone out of memory, and are scarcely to be obtained. The difficulty of procuring them is very great. Of our national nursery songs, some of them as old as our language, only a very common and inferior edition for children can be procured. Little Red Riding Hood and other fairy tales hallowed to children's use, are now turned into ribaldry as satires for men. As for the creation of a new fairy tale or touching ballad, such a thing is