Introduction in a natural and human manner with naughtiness. Thomas Day's ill-natured little boy was wicked in grain, Rosamund was merely unformed and impulsive ; but Limby Lumpy was naughty. It was a kindly thought of his author (but perhaps confusing to the nursery) to set the origin of the evil in the boy's parents. ' The Little Blue Bag,' on page 130, comes from a three- volume collection of stories called Tales for Ellen, 1825. The author was Alicia Catherine Mant, a lady of whom I know no more than that she wrote also long stories for older children or grown-up people. ' The Little Blue Bag ' is her prettiest tale. There is in it more of the pleasantest relations between a mother and a little girl in an English house of seven' or eight decades ago than in any story in this book. More, perhaps, than any other of the stories, 'The Little Blue Bag' is Ann- and-Jane-Taylorism translated into prose. Mrs. Clavering's kind, quick, good sense does much to balance the foolishness of the mothers on either side of her : Limby Lumpy's mother, on the one hand, and, on the other, Alfred's mother in ' The Oyster Patties.' Both the authorship and the source of ' The Oyster Patties/ on page 159, are unknown to me, but it is a good story. Like ' Limby Lumpy ' and ' The Villager Metamorphosed,' it possesses another of the infrequent mothers who were at least as blameworthy as the child. Indeed, Alfred's mother, since she told a distinct falsehood, is as much worthy of being the protagonist of a moral story as her little son, with a very severe punishment to complete it. In the old books, as I have said, the parents who can do no wrong are very numerous ; but they are, it should be pointed out, usually the parents of the central child. There are very often parents and relations of other and subsidiary children whose undesirable habits are exceedingly valuable by way of contrast. Comparisons were never odious to the old moralists. Thus, in Miss Edgeworth's ' Simple Susan ' we have the rapacious family of Attorney Case ; and in the ' Story of the Ill-natured Little Boy,' on page 48, the badness of the father xi
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