[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.
IV. CONCERNING NOW AND THEN
Ce que je vois alors dans ce jardin, c’est un petit bonhomme qui, les mains dans les poches et sa gibecière au dos, s’en va au collège en sautillant comme un moineau. Ma pensée seule le voit; car ce petit bonhomme est une ombre; c’est l’ombre du moi que j’étais il y a vingt-cinq ans. Vraiment, il m’intéresse, ce petit: quand il existait, je ne me souciais guère de lui; mais, maintenant qu’il n’est plus, je l’aime bien. Il valait mieux, en somme, que les autres moi que j’ai eus après avoir perdu celui-là. Il était bien étourdi; mais il n’était pas méchant et je dois lui; rendre cette justice qu’il ne m’a pas laissé un seul mauvais souvenir; c’est un innocent que j’ai perdu: il est bien naturel que je le regrette; il est bien naturel que je le voie en pensée et que mon esprit s’amuse à ranimer son souvenir.... Tout ce qu’il voyait alors, je le vois aujourd’hui. C’est le même ciel et la méme terre; les choses ont leur âme d’autrefois, leur âme qui m’égaye et m’attriste, et me trouble; lui seul n’est plus.—Anatole France, in “Le Livre de mon Ami.”