Introduction

books, especially in 1847. To-day we expect a certain amount of sympathy with mischief and revolt, but sixty years ago things were different, and the creator of Bob was among the innovators. There are, I think, internal indications that the story is more or less a true one, and that a Bob really existed. Perhaps he lives still. I do not remember anywhere a fresher or more spirited description of a game than that which begins on page 309 ; it was quite a literary feat to get so much vigour and fun into it. Nor even in quite modern books is there a truer nursery conversation than that on page 295. Just so are nurses criticised. To ' A Plot of Gunpowder • I have already referred, and we come now to the last of the nineteen — to ' Uncle David's Nonsensical Story of Giants and Fairies,' which is from that still admirable anl entertaining book Holiday House, 1839, by Catherine Sinclair (1800-1864). Miss Sinclair was associated with giants from earliest days, for she was one of so tall a family that when a new pavement was laid before her father's house in Edinburgh, it was called ' The Giants' Causeway.' In addition to Holiday House, she wrote a number of shrewd and amusing novels, and she also compiled a note - book of excellent sense and humour — The Kaleidoscope. Among her hobbies was the writing of picture-letters or hieroglyphics, several of which were published in Edinburgh some forty years ago. One of these I have borrowed to illustiate this rambling preface (see pages xvi-xix). Miss Sinclair's Holiday House was the first children's book, so far as I know, in which the modern spirit manifests ' itself. Hitherto children had been meek and acceptive in the presence of their elders - naughty enough, of course, on occa- sion, but never daring to dream that mistakes could come from those in authority. The first example of modern nursery scepticism that I can recollect is in Holiday House ; but there was a hint of encouraged disrespect many years before, in the Fool of Quality, in the joyous description of the engine devised for driving a needle through the seat of Mr. Vindex's chair. That book, however, if ever it reached children, did so by