her evident love of children.  It is only by love that understanding comes, and no one ever understood children better or painted them half so well:  they are no mites of puny perfection, no angels astray, no Psyches in all the agonies of the bursting chrysalis, but real little flesh-and-blood people in pinafores, approached by nobody’s hand so nearly as George Eliot’s.  They are flawless:  the boy who, having swung himself giddy, felt “the world turning round, as papa says it does, nurse,”—­the other boy, who, immured in studies and dreams, found all life to be “a fairy-tale book with half the leaves uncut,”—­the charming little snow-drop of a Carlotta, “who would sit next him, would stick her tiny fork into his face, with a morsel of turkey at the end of it, would poke crumbs into his mouth with her finger, would put up her lips to kiss him, would say, every moment, ’I like you much,—­much!’ with all Davy’s earnestness, though with just so much of her mother’s modesty as made her turn pink and shy, and put herself completely over the chair into Seraphael’s lap when we laughed at her.”  And Philippa, and Philippa’s conversation, capers, and cat! an impossibility to those who have never experienced her whirlwinds of exuberance,—­and to those who have, a reproduction of the drollest days of their existence.  Never was there a personage so perfectly drawn, never such a grotesque storm of noisy health,—­the matchless Philippa!  After reading Miss Sheppard’s juveniles, you feel that you have been in most good and innocent company all day; and since it is necessary for an author to become for the moment that nature of which he writes, this author must have been something very good and innocent in herself in order to uphold this strain so long.  Of those accessible, the best is that entitled, “Round the Fire,”—­a series of tales purporting to be told by little girls, and each of extraordinary interest; but the one she herself preferred is yet with four others in the hands of an Edinburgh publisher, and perhaps yet in manuscript,—­the name of this being “Prince Gentil, Prince Joujou, and Prince Bonbon, or the Children’s Cities.”  This reminds one that cities, in the abstract, seem to have been with her a subject of unceasing wonder and pleasure,—­from Venice, with its shadowy, slippery, silent water-ways to X, that ideal city of the North; and where is there anything to excel the Picture of Paris, drawn minutely and colored, his prison-prophecy, Paris as it was to be created, rather than restored, by Louis Napoleon?  “Then he took from his pocket a strong magnifying-glass, and put it gently into Rodomant’s hand.  Rodomant grasped it, and through it gazed long and eagerly.  And from that hieroglyphic mist there started, sudden and distinct as morn without a cloud, a brilliant bird’s-eye view of a superb and stupendous city, a dream of imaginative architecture, almost in itself a poem.  Each house of each street, each lamp and fountain, each line of road and pavement,