We said, if any man would keep bees, he must make them his friends;-nay, that is a cold word-he must love them. De Gelien makes the remark,-which we have heard before of figs, and olives, and medlars, and truffles, or of an equivocal dish recommended by a host, that you must either like them very much or not at all. Beaucoup de gens aiment les abeilles: je n'ai vu personne qui les aima médiocrement; on se passionne pour elles! It was this love we suppose that led Mahomet to make an exception in their favour when all other flies were condemned;-that made Napoleon, who laughed at the English as a nation of shopkeepers, select this emblem of industry, in place of the idle lily, 'That tasks not one laborious hour." And Urban VIII. and Louis XII. adopted them as the device on their coat of arms; and Camdeo, the Cupid of Budhism, strung his bow with bees! The Athenians ranked the introduction of the Bee among their great national blessings, tracing it up to Cecrops, the friend of man,'-the Attic Alfred; and such regard is still paid to them in many parts of the south of England, that no death, or birth, or marriage takes place in the family without its being communicated to the bees, whose hive is covered in the first case with a piece of black cloth, in the two latter with red. The 10th of August is considered their day of Jubilee, and those who are seen working on that day are called Quakers, Omens were wont to be taken from their swarming; and their settling on the mouths of Plato and Pindar was taken as a sure presage of the sweetness of their future eloquence and poetry; though these legends are somewhat spoiled, by the same. event being related of the infancy of Lucan and of St. Ambrose, called, as was Vives afterwards, the Mellifluous Doctor. We all know of Nestor's honeyed' words, and Xenophon, cujus sermo est melle dulcior.' Bees have not only dispersed a mob, but defeated an Amurath with his Janissaries;* but it would be quite impossible in a sketch like this to attempt to give anything like a full account of their many honours and achievements, and of the extraordinary instinct displayed by them in every operation of their manifold works. Our object in these remarks has been rather to stimulate the novice in this subject than to give any complete history of their habits, or to put forth any new discovery or system of our own. We have introduced our little friends with our best The Abbé della Rocca relates that, when Amurath, the Turkish emperor, during a certain siege, had battered down part of the wall, and was about to take the town by assault, he found the breach defended by bees, many hives of which the inhabitants had stationed on the ruins. The Janissaries, although the bravest soldiers in the Ottoman empire, durst not encounter this formidable line of defence, and refused to advance.' grace, grace, and must leave them now to make the best of their way with our readers. 'So work the Honey Bees: Creatures that, by a rule in nature, teach The singing masons building roofs of gold; Henry V. a. 1, s. 2. Who would not affirm, from this and other incidental allusions, that Shakspeare had a hive of his own? Dr. Bowring has only been able to discover in them galleries of art and schools of industry, and professors teaching eloquent lessons;' perhaps our friend means Mechanics' Institutes, and travelling lecturers. ART. II.-1. The Child's Book on the Soul, with Questions adapted to the Use of Schools and Infant Schools. By the Rev. T. H. Gallaudet. London. 1842. 2. The Youth's Book on Natural Theology, illustrated in Familiar Dialogues. By the Rev. T. H. Gallaudet. Published by the American Tract Society. 1840. 3. Peter Parley's Farewell. New York. 4. Peter Parley's Magazine. New York. 5. Abbott's Little Philosopher, for Schools and Families. London. 6. Abbott's Child at Home. 7. Abbott's Rollo at Work, and Rollo at Play, &c. London. COULD the shade of a great-grandmother be recalled to earth, we can imagine no object in this age of wonders so likely to astonish her venerable mind as her little descendants' abundance of books. In her days children were not looked upon as reading beings: the key of the little glass-fronted bookcase was as carefully kept from them as that of the sweetmeat cupboard. cupboard. Free access to books was considered of very questionable benefit to a young mind, and decidedly injurious to the eyesight; for it is an amusing fact that in those days of curious needlework, the ancient samples of which make us equally admire our grandmothers' patience and pity their eyes, a consideration for that organ should have been made one of the principal excuses for denying a child the pleasure of reading. Certain it is, that as soon as the scanty portion of elementary books was laid aside for the day most children did not read at all, while those who had intellectual desires cultivated their minds almost by stealth; and the little girl of nearly a century ago, who thirsted for knowledge above her fellows, has been known to hide a new book in her capacious pocket, and read it through the pocket-hole! Nor were her stolen pleasures such as most modern parents would have cared, or perhaps even permitted, their children to share. Between the formalities of real life and the exaggerations of fiction there was little alternative,-from the fairy tales and marvellous histories, terminating in the old version of the Arabian Nights,'-the few wonderful voyages and adventures centering in Robinson Crusoe,'-and the little tales of a moral tendency, generally the histories of some little paragon of goodness, or monster of naughtiness, whose dispositions were at once comprehensively announced in their patronymics,-between such works as these, and that better class to which the Vicar of Wakefield' and papers of the Spectator' might be considered as introductory, there was a wide gap. No wonder, then, with the increase of population, and the changes in education, which marked the latter end of the last century, that the age soon began to demand something more and something better. The only real question is, whether the improvement in children's books has been equally in quality as in quantity, and whether a better understanding of a child's real capacities for instruction, edification, and amusement has kept pace with the varied and additional modes of addressing them. The first changes in a juvenile library were no less in what are termed school-books than in those of a lighter description. Parents and teachers had discovered that not only the system of education might be simplified and its stores increased, but that the love of reading which showed itself in many a child's leisure hours might be made the handle for turning various little mills of indirect acquirement. What, in short, they themselves had groaned under or longed for in their own young days, they now sought to amend or supply for their children. To aid the former, much of the monotonous repetition of spelling-book, dictionary, and grammar, in which children's minds had been kept, as it were, only only for stowage, was repealed; while to effect the latter many excellent and highly-gifted individuals of both sexes stepped forward and presented works, some of which ought ever to maintain their places in the hands of childhood. Besides original works of great merit, our young people were furnished with extracts and compilations from the best classic and old English writers, and with abridgements from the first standard authors, while much of the decorous and respectful tone of the old-fashioned school was preserved, and the comparative abundance with which they were surrounded was not such as to make children indifferent to its advantages. Nevertheless we need hardly look beyond a child's book-shelf to be reminded that there is nothing in the world which requires so much caution as reform. In their glee at detecting the errors of a past age, these writers did not avail themselves of all its wisdom. Because their predecessors had appealed almost exclusively, and sometimes most perniciously, to the imagination, the real intention of this faculty was now disregarded; the marvellous and the romantic, even when free from all impurity, was condemned by some as useless, by others as false; and one of the most striking features of this change of system may be characterised as the predominance of a more direct moral teaching, and the studious assumption of truth and nature in which it was clothed. This sounds so desirable and right, that any argument as to the entire expediency of its application may seem worse than paradoxical; but, as Lord Bacon says, Works of imagination hurt not a child taking them at the worst, it is not the lie that passeth through the mind, but the lie that sinketh in, and settleth in it, which doth the hurt;' and it may be justly questioned whether, in banishing the world of fiction, and advancing one of reality in its place, we have not sometimes dismissed a protector, and introduced an enemy. The more we aim at reality in the precepts and models we offer to children, the more delicate and difficult does our task become. A vessel never requires abler steerage than when close inshore-and any error in what you give forth as truth is immeasurably more pernicious than all the extravagances which a child knows to be fiction. According to Mrs. Hannah More, Until to analyse you 're able, Fable is safe, while given as fable.' The converse will be also found to hold good: for truth, or rather what we represent as truth, is never so unsafe for a child as when brought into immediate comparison with his own actual knowledge of life. It is more dangerous for a child than many suppose to read of parents, as parents are invariably described, who who always reward good deeds, applaud self-conquests, or assist good determinations: the first feeling is to believe the first impulse to imitate; and if the little sanguine heart should not happen to find the real parent exactly in that humour which the story promised, the disappointment is more harmful than can be imagined. Another and more vital error, traceable to the same source, is the total absence, in some of these writers, of a sound religious basis. Everything is made to spring from the mere moral conviction-from the mere rational obligation-so that the excellencies of the parent, and the strivings of the children they bring forward, being independent of the only rule and help, are, strictly speaking, more chimerical and false than the most farfetched wonders they were intended to replace. Altogether, then, if we consider our own liability to err in what we teach, and the touching readiness of the young faith which is intrusted to us to direct, it would seem that the abundance of the imaginative quality and entire enjoyment of fiction which distinguishes childhood had been granted purposely as a safe and necessary nether sphere. But if matter for criticism be not failing among the solid writers of what may be termed the middle ages of children's literature, what shall be said for those of the present day? Here apparently there is no deficiency of any one thing, but rather a surfeit of all; while the order and combination in which this abundance is given are so intricate and unaccountable as equally to defy analysis or classification. Upon the whole, an hour spent in a modern juvenile library will be found to tell a more direct tale, and give a clearer picture of the spirit of change and thirst for novelty which mark the present day, than any other application of the same time in the multitudinous range of recent wonders. Transposition and experiment seem the motto of the present children's books. We do not know when they are at work, or when at play. The streams of instruction and amusement, of application and relaxation, instead of pursuing distinct channels, have incomprehensibly run and blended together. Side by side, in strange propinquity with elaborate treatises on subjects which it might be thought no child of common observation would require to be taught, lie familiar notices on matters which, like the Adelaide Gallery, no mind, without immense previous knowledge, can derive any benefit from. The highest and the lowest have changed places. The one is compelled into a garb which, in our humble opinion, greatly endangers the respect due to it, while the other is put forward with a pomp and circumstance too apt to mislead the juvenile mind as to its real insig nificance. To combine instruction designedly with amusement is, we |