Page:The small library. A guide to the collection and care of books (IA smalllibraryguid00browiala).pdf/27

 become famous, is not, on the whole, so salutary as many suppose. It has much the same effect on the minds of healthy and spirited boys and girls as perpetual injunctions to model their deportment and behaviour on some paragon youth or maiden whose conduct is the admiration of all the conventional mothers of a large neighbourhood. Nothing is more repulsive to any healthy-minded youngster than to have these incarnations of all the namby-pamby little virtues set up as patterns for imitation. So exemplary biography is, on the whole, rather a fetish, and calculated to make the 'men who have made themselves' unpopular, and the record of their deeds a wearisome grind. Popular accounts of voyages and travels, and historical books like Scott's Tales of a Grandfather, are on quite another level, and, if such works were not to be had in abundance in Public Libraries, it would be necessary to specify a few. But this part of the subject only proposes to touch the question of good and suitable books for small home libraries, and not that of furnishing larger and more general collections. The most desirable books for a small Children's Home Library are those which can be used by generation after generation of youngsters without becoming tiresome, and which the same child can read over and over again without much loss of interest. In other words, books which have proved their power to interest and even instruct children, by awakening their perceptive faculties, through many years of existence. Imaginative literature, particularly in a prose form,