Knowledge, insignificant and vapid as Mrs
Barbauld's books convey, it seems must come to a child in the shape of
knowledge; and his empty noddle must be turned with conceit of his own
powers when he has learnt that a horse is an animal, and Billy is
better than a horse, and such like, instead of that beautiful interest
in wild tales, which made the child a man, while all the time he
suspected himself to be no bigger than a child. Science has succeeded
to poetry no less in the little walks of children than with men. Is
there no possibility of averting this sore evil? Think what you would
have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives'
fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural
history!
"Hang them!--I mean the cursed Barbauld crew, those blights and blasts
of all that is human in man and child."[B]
There must, however, be many parents still living who remember the
delight that the little story gave them in their younger days, and
they will, no doubt, be pleased to see it once more in the form which
was then so familiar to them.
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