freedom of the young Republic that has caused the children of the more mature nation to delight in the repetition of the patriotic verses.  The youthful extravagance of expression pervading every line is reechoed in the heart of the schoolboy, who likes to imagine himself, before anything else, a patriot.  But until “Donder and Blitzen” pranced into the foreground as Santa Claus’ steeds, there was nothing in American nursery literature of any lasting fame.  Thereafter, as the custom of observing Christmas Day gradually became popular, the perennial small child felt—­until automobiles sent reindeer to the limbo of bygone things—­the thrill of delight and fear over the annual visit of Santa Claus that the bigger child experiences in exploding fire-crackers on the Fourth of July.  There are possibilities in both excitements which appeal to one of the child’s dearest possessions—­his imagination.

It is this direct appeal to the imagination that surprises and delights us in Mr. Moore’s ballad.  To re-read it is to be amazed that anything so full of merriment, so modern, so free from pompousness or condescension, from pedantry or didacticism, could have been written before the latter half of the nineteenth century.  Not only its style is simple in contrast with the labored efforts at simplicity of its contemporaneous verse, but its story runs fifty years ahead of its time in its freedom from the restraining hand of the moralist and from the warning finger of the religious teacher, if we except Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Wonder Book.”

In our examination of the toy-books of twenty years preceding its publication, we shall find nothing so attractive in manner, nor so imaginative in conception.  Indeed, we shall see, upon the one hand, that fun was held in with such a tight curb that it hardly ever escaped into print; and upon the other hand that the imagination had little chance to develop because of the prodigal indulgence in realities and in religious experience from which all authors suffered.  We shall also see that these realities were made very uncompromising and uncomfortable to run counter to.  Duty spelled in capital letters was a stumbling-block with which only the well-trained story-book child could successfully cope; recreation followed in small portions large shares of instruction, whether disguised or bare faced.  The Religion-in-Play, the Ethics-in-Play, and the Labor-in-Play schools of writing for children had arrived in America from the land of their origin.

The stories in vogue in England during this first quarter of the nineteenth century explain every vagary in America.  There fashionable and educational authorities had hitched their wagon to the literary star, Miss Edgeworth, and the followers of her system; while the religiously inclined pinned their faith also upon tracts written by Miss Hannah More.  In this still imitative land the booksellers simply reprinted the more successful of these juvenile publications.  The changes, therefore, in the character of the juvenile literature of amusement of the early nineteenth century in America were due to the adoption of the works of these two Englishwomen, and to the increased facilities for reproducing toy-books, both in press-work and in illustrations.