FOOTNOTES
[31] She is the author of a remarkably bold “Manuel du Voyageur” en Six Langues. Paris, Barrois, 1810. Framed to meet every conceivable occasion.
[32] Day was honest in his intentions, however mistaken his policy may have been. Sabrina finally married a Mr. Bicknell, who willingly allowed her to accept support, meagre as it was, from Day.
[33] Mrs. Godwin [Mary Wollstonecraft] (1759–1797) began, as an exercise, to translate “The Elements of Morality, for the Use of Children,” written by the Reverend Christian Gotthilf Salzmann (1744–1811), who won no small renown for the excellence of his school, founded upon the principles set down by Rousseau. “The design of this book,” says the worthy master, “is to give birth to what we call a good disposition in children.” The chief delight of the 1782 edition, published in three volumes, are the copperplates which represent in the most graphic way, by pose, gesture, expression, and caption, all the ills that juvenile flesh is heir to. No one, after having once viewed the poor little figure seated on a most forbidding-looking sofa, can quite resist the pangs of sympathy over his exclamation: “How sad is life without a friend!” Life is indeed a direful wilderness of trials and vexations. The prismatic colors of one’s years shrivel up before such wickedness as is expressed by the picture “I hate you!” And yet how simple is the remedy for a boy’s bad disposition, according to the Reverend Mr. Salzmann! “Teach him,” so the philosopher argues in his preface, “that envy is the vexation which is felt at seeing the happiness of others: you will have given him a just idea of it; but shew him its dreadful effects, in the example of Hannah in chap. 29, vol. II, who was so tormented by this corroding passion, at her sister’s wedding, that she could neither eat, drink, nor sleep, and was so far carried away by it as to embitter her innocent sister’s pleasure; this representation has determined the child’s disposition—he will hate envy.” Elements of Morality ... Translated from the German.... 3d ed. (3 vols.) London, 1782.
[34] Charles Lamb has recorded his vivid impressions of this book in “Witches and Other Night Fears.”
[35] It is interesting to note the longevity of many of the women writers of this period. Both Miss Edgeworth and Mrs. Barbauld died in their eighty-second year, while Miss More reached the ripe age of eighty-eight. Mrs. Trimmer, nearing seventy, was thus comparatively young at the time of her death. A glimpse of Miss More at seventy-nine is left in the reminiscences of the original Peter Parley, who visited her, circa 1823, much as a devout pilgrim would make a special journey. He wrote: “She was small and wasted away. Her attire was of dark-red bombazine, made loose like a dressing-gown. Her eyes were black and penetrating, her face glowing with cheerfulness, through a lace-work of wrinkles. Her head-dress was a modification of the coiffure of her earlier days—the hair being slightly frizzled, and lightly powdered, yet the whole group of moderate dimensions.”
[36] Vide the lay sermon by Samuel McCord Crothers, “The Colonel in the Theological Seminary.”—Atlantic, June, 1907. Also Emerson’s essay on “Spiritual Laws.”
[37] Vide Miss Strickland’s “Lives of the Seven Bishops.”
[38] For Jane Taylor, vide “Contributions of Q Q;” “Essays in Rhymes on Morals and Planners.” For Ann Taylor, vide “Hymns for Infant Schools.”
[39] Frederic Harrison, in his “The Choice of Books,” (Macmillan, 1886) writes:
“Poor Lamb has not a little to answer for, in the revived relish for garbage unearthed from old theatrical dung-heaps. Be it just or earnest, I have little patience with the Elia-tic philosophy of the frivolous. Why do we still suffer the traditional hypocrisy about the dignity of literature,—literature I mean, in the gross, which includes about equal parts of what is useful and what is useless? Why are books as books, writers as writers, readers as readers, meritorious, apart from any good in them, or anything that we can get from them?”
[40] The reader is referred to “The Moral Instruction of Children,” by Felix Adler, New York: Appleton, 1892. Besides considering the use to be made of fairy tales, fables, and Bible stories, the author discusses fully the elements in the Odyssey and the Iliad which are valuable adjuncts in moral training.