Would you believe it, in this highly moral and virtuous age? they have actually written stories!—­stories that were not true!  They haven’t seemed to care a button whether they told the truth or not!  Where can they have contracted the deadly heresy that imagination, feeling, and affection, are good things, deserving encouragement?  Mark the effect of these pernicious teachings!  Hundreds and thousands—­nay, fellow mortal, millions of children,—­now walk the earth, believing in fairies, giants, ogres, and such-like unreal personages, and yet unable (we blush to say it!) to tell why the globe we live on is flattened at the poles!  Is it not a serious question whether children who persistently ignore what is true and important, but cherish fondly these abominable fables, may not ultimately be lost?

But, thanks to the recent growth of practical sense—­or the decline of the inventive faculty—­in writers for the young, a better day is dawning, and there is still some hope for the world.  Men of sense and morality are coming forward:  they dedicate their minds to this service—­those practical minds whence will be extracted the only true pabulum for the growing intellect.  It is to minds of this stamp—­so truly the antipodes of all that is youthful, spontaneous, and child-like, (in a word:  frivolous,) that we must look for those solid works which, in the Millennium that is coming, will perfectly supplant what may be termed, without levity, the “Cock and Bull” system of juvenile entertainment.  Worldly people may consider this stuff graceful and touching, sweet and loveable; but it is nevertheless clearly mischievous, else pious and proper persons wouldn’t have said so, time and again.

For our part, we may as well confess that our sympathies go out undividedly toward that important class who are averse to Nonsense,—­more particularly book-nonsense,—­which they can’t stand, and won’t stand, and there’s an end of it.  There is something exceedingly winning, to us, in that sturdy sense, that thirst for mathematical precision, that impatience of theory, that positive and self-reliant—­we don’t mind saying, somewhat dogmatical—­air, that sternness of feature, thinness of lip, and coldness of eye, which belong to the best examples.  We respect even the humbler ones; for they at least hate sentiment, they do not comprehend or approve of humor, and they never relish wit.  What does a taste for these qualities indicate, but an idle and frivolous mind, devoted to trifles:  and how fatal is such a taste, in the pursuit of wealth and respectability!

Fantastic people have much to say of the “affections,” the “graces and amenities of life,” “soul-culture,” and the like.  We cannot too deeply deplore their fatuity, in giving prominence to such abstractions.  As for children, the most we can concede is, that they have a natural—­though, of course, depraved—­taste for stories:  yes, we will say that this fondness is irrepressible.  But, what we really must insist on, is, that in gratifying that fondness, you give them true stories.  Where is the carefully trained and upright soul that would not reject “JACK, the Giant-killer,” or “Goody Two-shoes,” if it could substitute (say, from “New and True Stories for Children,”) a tale as thrilling as this: