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The adult attitude towards children has changed even during the last fifty years, and largely for the better. Yet the child’s attitude towards his playmate, and even towards the omniscient grown-up, is fundamentally what it has been throughout the ages.

The early nineteenth century is often quoted by deprecators of the twentieth as a time when the attitude of youth towards age was particularly praiseworthy in its modesty and reverence. Such people, who are perhaps a little prone to forget their own youthful viewpoint, tell us that in those golden days children accepted without question the opinions of those who were set in authority over them, and were almost invariably obedient, contented and unenterprising. Yet, researches in the literature published especially for children by that “friend of youth,” John Newbery, at “the corner of St. Paul’s Churchyard,” in his little “gilt books”—most of them published between 1745 and 1802—prove that badly-behaved children were by no means uncommon, and that over-indulgent parents were not unknown. In the “Histories of More Children than One; or, Goodness Better than Beauty,” Master John and Miss Mary Strictum, who, as their names imply, are models of deportment, are unfavorably contrasted with Master Thomas and Miss Kitty Bloomer.