In Lesson X, which I quote, although it says nothing of charity or kindness, a vastly more human spirit is found than in any of Mrs. Mason’s homilies on our duty to the afflicted:—
See how much taller you are than William. In four years you have learned to eat, to walk, to talk. Why do you smile? You can do much more, you think: you can wash your hands and face. Very well. I should never kiss a dirty face. And you can comb your head with the pretty comb you always put by in your own drawer. To be sure, you do all this to be ready to take a walk with me. You would be obliged to stay at home, if you could not comb your own hair. Betty is busy getting the dinner ready, and only brushes William’s hair, because he cannot do it for himself.
Betty is making an apple-pye. You love an apple-pye; but I do not bid you make one. Your hands are not strong enough to mix the butter and flour together; and you must not try to pare the apples, because you cannot manage a great knife.
Never touch the large knives: they are very sharp, and you might cut your finger to the bone. You are a little girl, and ought to have a little knife. When you are as tall as I am, you shall have a knife as large as mine; and when you are as strong as I am, and have learned to manage it, you will not hurt yourself.
You can trundle a hoop, you say; and jump over a stick. O, I forgot!—and march like men in the red coats, when papa plays a pretty tune on the fiddle.
Even a very little of the tender spirit that this lesson breathes, even a very little of its sense of play, would have leavened the _Original Stories_ into a more wholesome consistency. As it stands, that book is one of the most perfect examples of the success with which, a century or more ago, any ingratiating quality could be kept out of a work for the young. According to William Godwin, his unhappy wife had always a pretty and endearing way with children. Yet of pretty and endearing ways, as of humour, I take him to have been a bad judge; for I do not think that any woman possessing enough sympathy to attach children to her as he, in one of the most curious biographies in the language, assures us that she had, could have suppressed the gift so completely in her first book for young minds. And the Mrs. Masonic character of her own Preface supports my view.