Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales

It were greatly to be desired that the instructors of our children could be persuaded how much is lost by rejecting the venerable relics of nursery traditional literature, and substituting in their place the present cold, unimaginative, I had almost said, unnatural, —prosaic good-boy stories". In the latter case, "observes Sir Walter Scott", their minds are, as it were, put into the stocks, like their feet at the dancing-school, and the moral always consists in good conduct being crowned with success. Truth is, I would not give one tear shed over Little Red Riding Hood for all the benefit to be derived from a hundred histories of Jemmy Goodchild. I think the selfish tendencies will be soon enough acquired in this arithmetical age; and that, to make the higher class of character, our own wild fictions—like our own simple music—will have more effect in awakening the fancy and elevating the disposition, than the colder and more elaborate compositions of modern authors and composers".