One of the beautiful things of to-day in England is the wealth of children’s literature.  It is a peculiar grace of our time that we are all trying to give the best to the children, and this is most of all remarkable in the books published for them.  We had rather a silly moment in which we kept them babies too long and thought that rhymes without reason would please them, and another moment when we were just a little morbid about them; but now we have struck a very happy vein, free from all morbidness, very innocent and very happy, abounding in life and in no way unfitting for the experiences that have to be lived through afterwards.  No one thinks it waste of time to write and illustrate books for children, and to do their very best in both, and the result of historical research and the most critical care of texts is put within the children’s reach with a real understanding of what they can care for.  A true appreciation of the English classics must result from this, and the mere reading of what is choice is an early safeguard against the less good.

Reading, without commentary, is what is best accepted; we are beginning to come back to this belief.  It is agreed almost generally that there has been too much comment and especially too much analysis in our teaching of literature, and that the majesty or the loveliness of our great writers’ works have not been allowed to speak for themselves.  We have not trusted them enough, and we have not trusted the children so much as they deserved.  The little boy who said he could understand if only they would not explain has become historical, and his word of warning, though it may not have sounded quite respectful, has been taken into account.  We have now fewer of the literary Baedeker’s guides who stopped us at particular points, to look back for the view, and gave the history and date of the work with its surrounding circumstances, and the meaning of every word, while they took away the soul of the poem, and robbed us of our whole impression.  We realize now that by reading and reading again, until they have mastered the music, and the meaning dawns of itself, children gain more than the best annotations can give them; these will be wanted later on, but in the beginning they set the attitude of mind completely wrong for early literary study in which reverence and receptiveness and delight are of more account than criticism.  The memory of these things is so much to us in after life, and if the living forms of beautiful poems have been torn to pieces to show us the structure within, and the matter has been shaken out into ungainly paraphrase and pursued with relentless analysis until it has given up the last secret of its meaning, the remembrance of this destructive process will remain and the spirit will never be the same again.  The best hope for beautiful memories is in perfect reading aloud, with that reverence of mind and reticence of feeling which keeps itself in the background, not