Dialogue was the usual method of instruction employed by Miss Edgeworth and her followers.  In “Garden Amusements” the conversation was interrupted by a note criticising a quotation from Milton as savoring too much of poetic license.  Cowper also gained the anonymous critic’s disapproval, although it was his point of view and not his style that came under censure.

In still another series of stories often reprinted from London editions were those moral tales with the sub-title “Cautionary Stories in Verse.”  Mr. William James used these “Cautionary Verses for Children” as an example of the manner in which “the muse of evangelical protestantism in England, with the mind fixed on the ideas of danger, had at last drifted away from the original gospel of freedom.”  “Chronic anxiety,” Mr. James continued, “marked the earlier part of this [nineteenth] century in evangelical circles.”  A little salmon-colored volume, “The Daisy,” is a good example of this series.  Each rhyme is a warning or an admonition; a chronic fear that a child might be naughty.  “Drest or Undrest” is typical of the sixteen hints for the proper conduct of every-day life contained in the innocent “Daisy:” 

   “When children are naughty and will not be drest,
    Pray what do you think is the way? 
    Why, often I really believe it is best
    To keep them in night-clothes all day!

   “But then they can have no good breakfast to eat,
    Nor walk with their mother and aunt;
    At dinner they’ll have neither pudding nor meat,
    Nor anything else that they want.

   “Then who would be naughty and sit all the day
    In night-clothes unfit to be seen! 
    And pray who would lose all their pudding and play
    For not being drest neat and clean.”

Two other sets of books with a like purpose were brought out by Charles about eighteen hundred and sixteen.  One began with those familiar nursery verses entitled “My Mother,” by Ann Taylor, which were soon followed by “My Father,” all the family, “My Governess,” and even “My Pony.”  The other set of books was “calculated to promote Benevolence and Virtue in Children.”  “Little Fanny,” “Little Nancy,” and “Little Sophie” were all held up as warnings of the results of pride, greed, and disobedience.

[Illustration:  Drest or Undrest]

The difference between these heroines of fiction and the characters drawn by Maria Edgeworth lies mainly in the fact that they spoke in rhyme instead of in prose, and that they were almost invariably naughty; or else the parents were cruel and the children suffered.  Rarely do we find a cheerful tale such as “The Cherry Orchard” in this cautionary style of toy-book.  Still more rarely do we find any suspicion of that alloy of nonsense supposed by Miss Edgeworth to make the sense work well.  It is all quite serious.  “Little Nancy, or, the Punishment of Greediness,” is representative of this sort of moral and cautionary tale.  The frontispiece, “embellishing” the first scene, shows Nancy in receipt of an invitation to a garden party: