When men go off the stage so early, it scarce seems a noticeable thing
in their epitaphs, whether they had been wise or silly in
their lifetime.
I am glad the snuff and Pi-pos's books please. "Goody Two Shoes" is
almost out of print. Mrs. Barbauld's stuff has banished all the old
classics of the nursery; and the shopman at Newberry's hardly deigned to
reach them off an old exploded corner of a shelf, when Mary asked for
them. Mrs. B.'s and Mrs. Trimmer's nonsense lay in piles about.
Knowledge insignificant and vapid as Mrs. B.'s books convey, it seems,
must come to the child in the _shape_ of _knowledge_, and his empty
noddle must be turned with conceit of his own powers when he has learned
that a horse is an animal, and Billy is better than a horse, and such
like; instead of that beautiful interest in wild tales which made the
child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger
than a child. Science has succeeded to poetry no less in the little
walks of children than with men. Is there no possibility of averting
this sore evil? Think what you would have been now, if instead of being
fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed
with geography and natural history!
Hang them!--I mean the cursed Barbauld crew, those blights and blasts of
all that is human in man and child.
As to the translations, let me do two or three hundred lines, and then
do you try the nostrums upon Stuart in any way you please.
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