Page:Old fashioned tales.djvu/11

 The nineteen stories in this volume were written before the days when authors of books for children added to their ambition to please the nursery the wish to be thought clever outside it too; and though it may of course be held that the desire to point a moral — to impart ethical instruction — was quite as pronounced as it ought to be among all these writers, and that they spent at least as much time in being didactic as we moderns in being clever, yet it seems to me that, taking the times into account, to be didactic was permissible; whereas to be consciously clever is still really against the rules.

The children of those days — our great-great-grandfathers — expected didacticism. It was part of the game. The first remark that a grown-up visitor to the nursery then made had a flavour of admonishment or of a superior standard of conduct; the last remark was its twin. The camaraderie, the good fellowship, the equality, that now subsists between children and so many of their elders, was then as unknown as electric light. Children were still the immature young of man ; they had not been discovered as personalities, temperaments, individuals. Perhaps of late the exploitation following upon this discovery has been a little overdone.

The way towards a nicer appreciation of the child's own