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by well-loved men of letters what poets first bewitched their ardent infant minds. It is especially pleasant to have Mr. Andrew Lang admit us a little way into his confidence, and confess to us that he disliked "Tam O'Shanter" when his father read it aloud to him; preferring, very sensibly, "to take my warlocks and bogies with great seriousness." Of course he did, and the sympathies of all children are with him in his choice. The ghastly details of that witches' Sabbath are far beyond a child's limited knowledge of demonology and the Scotch dialect. Tam's escape and Maggie's final catastrophe seem like insults offered to the powers of darkness; only the humor of the situation is apparent, and humor is seldom, to the childish mind, a desirable element of poetry. Not all the spirit of Caldecott's illustrations can make "John Gilpin" a real favorite in our nurseries, while "The Jackdaw of Rheims" is popular simply because children, being proof against cynicism, accept the story as it is told, with much misplaced sympathy for the thievish bird, and many secret rejoicings over his restoration to grace and feathers. As for "The Pied Piper of Hamelin,"