Page:The Children's Robinson Crusoe, Or, The Remarkable Adventures of an Englishman.pdf/11

 ADDRESS TO PARENTS.

short,whom children may safely love and admire, yet not

faultless, or they could not sympathize with him. In consequence of the mismanagement of his own mind, he

grows up with a strong bias for a sailor's life, which is the occasion of all hismisfortunes, whilst his good quali ties alleviate his sufferings under them.

He goes to sea with the consent, though against the wishes, ofhis parents ;andmeets, immediately,with disas ters, which occasion his being cast ashore on a desert

island. There his sufferings cure him of all his wandering propensities ; and he feels nothing but regret at having left his comfortable home, and contrition for having acted

contrary to the inclination of his parents. All the pros perous voyages ar.d bold enterprises, which in the original

tale precede Robinson Crusoe's life on the island, and

which are calculated to encourage a love of roaming over the world, are here purposely omitted ; and as this story

closes with the hero's return to England, after spending five years in solitude, there is no danger of its fostering, in the reader, any spirit of adventure, like that which De Foe's narrative has been known to infuse. Asmuch information about domestic arts as could well

be interwoven with the story, has been introduced ; but without attempting to make the book a child 's Encyclope dia, which would be apt to be occasionally consulted rath er than read. The hero is here left for a while destitute of all those materials, which the original Robinson Crusoe obtained from the vessel he was wrecked in, with

a view ofmaking the young reader fully sensible of the value of iron, of edgetools, and of all those means which eivilized life furnishes. This has been done in some of

the abridgments, already before the public ; butthe ob