Of 'Waste Not, Want Not' it is unnecessary to speak. It is one of the best of the stories in Miss Edgeworth's Parent's Assistant, most entertaining of books with dull names. I have my doubts as to whether Benjamin was not too much encouraged above Hal, but that has nothing to do with the story.
We come now to comedy and to farce. 'The Fugitive' I found in an odd little book by a Miss Pearson called A Few Weeks at Clairmont Castle, 1828; while 'The Butcher's Tournament' is from Peter Parley. I read this story when I was quite a child, and it always remained in my memory, and for several years of late I have kept up a desultory search for it. I could not, therefore, having chanced upon it in Peter Parley's Annual for 1843, omit it from this volume. The author's name is not given, but I suppose that William Martin wrote it—under the influence of Douglas Jerrold, I should say.
For 'Malleville's Night of Adventure' I have gone again to Jacob Abbott, from whom last year I took 'Embellishment.' The story is a chapter or two of Beechnut, best of the Franconia books. Later the author changed the name Malleville, which certainly is not beautiful, to Madeline; but I have left it here as in the original edition. There seems to be no middle way with Jacob Abbott: you must either think him the flattest of writers for children, or the most interesting. So many of my earliest recollections are bound up with Phonny and Beechnut that I shall always think of Jacob Abbott with enthusiasm. But the heretics in this matter I can understand, although pitying them too.
For looking through the scores and scores—I might, I believe, say hundreds—of books from which to select the twenty stories within these covers, I should consider myself amply rewarded by the discovery of Lady Anne. This story—I might almost say this novel—which is at once the longest and, to my mind, the best thing in the present volume, is anonymous. All that I know of the author is that she—I take it to be a woman's work—wrote also The Blue Silk Hand-bag, but of that book I have been able to catch no glimpse. In order to bring Lady Anne into this collection I have had here and there to condense a few pages, but I have touched nothing essential: the sweet little narrative is only shortened, never altered. Lady Anne was first published in 1823.
With 'Captain Murderer,' which ends the book, we come to another story by a novelist, this time a man of genius, Charles Dickens. The agreeably gruesome trifle occurs in the essay in The Uncommercial Traveller on 'Nurses' Stories,' and it was told to the little Dickens by a dreadful girl named Sarah, who chilled him also with the dark history of Chips, the ship's carpenter, and the rat of the Devil. The story of Chips is better than the story of Captain Murderer, but I do not care for the responsibility of laying it before you. The Captain may be held to be forbidding enough, but he is, all the same, well within the nursery's traditions of acceptable villainy, being only a variant upon Bluebeard and the giant who fed upon bread made with the bone-flour of Englishmen; whereas the story of Chips introduces infernal elements and makes rats too horrible to be thought about. So I feel; but if anyone complains of the grimness of the Captain I shall have, I fear, only a very poor defence.
E. V. L.
PAGE
Dicky Random; or, Good-Nature is nothing without Good Conduct; Anon. [1]
The Months; Anon. [15]
Jemima Placid; or, The Advantage of Good-Nature; Anon. [23]
Two Trials: I. Sally Delia; Anon. [48]
II. Harry Lenox; Anon. [58]
Prince Life; by G. P. R. James [72]
The Farm-Yard Journal; by the Aikins [90]
The Fruits of Disobedience; or, The Kidnapped Child; Anon. [98]
The Rose's Breakfast; Anon. [114]
The Three Cakes; by Armand Berquin [128]
Amendment; Anon. [136]
Scourhill's Adventures; Anon. [162]
The Journal; by Priscilla Wakefield [172]
Ellen and George; or, The Game at Cricket; by A. C. Mant [181]
Waste Not, Want Not; or, Two Strings to Your Bow; by Maria Edgeworth [204]
The Bunch of Cherries; Anon. [242]
The Fugitive; by Miss Pearson [256]
The Butcher's Tournament; by Peter Parley [275]
Malleville's Night of Adventure; by Jacob Abbott [297]
The Life and Adventures of Lady Anne; Anon. [320]
Captain Murderer; by Charles Dickens [422]