Literature for the Young.
We find the following truthful and timely hints to parents, in the Cincinnati Commercial: “There seems to be a conspiracy between book publishers and writers for the young, to destroy the taste of the rising generation for books containing substantial and useful information. Ninety-nine out of every hundred books written specially for the entertainment of the youth of the country are fictions, or, as moderately put by the authors, ‘stories founded on fact,’ and which slip into the best regulated families as Sunday-school literature, or books written to convey some lesson of morality. The art of the engraver and bookbinder is brought into requisition to give them an appetizing appearance. The illustrations are pretty, and the books undeniably attractive in their garments of red, and scarlet, and green, and gold. If some solicitous parent is doubtful about the value of these books as literary aliment for his children, he is met with the assurance that there is no harm in them—on the contrary, much good. They convey such useful lessons of duty, and inculcate such high morality, and in such a pleasant way, that children who read them, insensibly acquire and put in practice a system of morals as effective as if they had been taught them through the sterner forms of the New England primer and the catechism. Without further ado, therefore, he lugs home a basketful of this diluted trash, and distributes it with the other holiday gifts. The publishers and the writers find profit in the business, and the result is a shower of such books with the return of the holidays, each, if possible, weaker and more trashy than the other.” It would be a positive advantage to the children if the accumulated juvenile literature of the last twenty-five years were gathered together and made an example of, after the manner of the Alexandrian library. To be sure, some good and useful books would be lost, but there would be an average gain, if the whole were consumed in a sea of fire, and we would not have the Sunday-school books spared either, for they are the greatest offenders. Then let us have a restoration of the books that have meat in them, not the mildest of meat tea. Restore a few good books of travel, history, and biography, books treating of the principal discoveries of science in a popular style, and judicious selections from the recognized poets of our language; these form the food with which to develop the men and women of intellectual fiber and muscle. We protest against these everlasting series—the Dolly Dimple Series, the Ragged Dick Series, the Rolling Stone Series, the Tom Tit Series—one and all of which add to a weakness of invention, no end of sentimental nonsense, pious platitude, and feeble morality. A good, vigorous thought, vigorously expressed in plain English, would be a serious disturbing element in all this level of intellectual softness and mud.