Ineither give my children Fairy Tales to read, or The Arabian Nights, nor even Madame d' Aulnoy's Fables, which were composed for this purpose. There is scarcely one of them which has a moral tendency. Love is the subject in them all. You find a Princess persecuted on account of her beauty. A Prince, handsome as the day, dying for love of her, and a wicked, ugly rival, consumed with envy and jealously! Tho’ the moral of these little stories may be good, children cannot improve by them; and only struck with the wonderful, they will remember nothing but the enchanted gardens and diamond palaces; all these ridiculous ideas give them only false notions, stop the course of their reasoning, and inspire them with a dislike for instructive reading. Locke complains that there is not a single work existing proper for infancy; I know not one in the French language, though it would be so useful. The fixing our first principles and turn of mind depends greatly on the impressions we receive in infancy: it is therefore necessary these books should be written with great simplicity; that they should be equally interesting and instructing, and to vary the form of these little histories will also be proper. And I believe, if the subjects were well chosen, and the charms and simplicity of Nature were properly described, it would make such works more valuable than you have any idea of: now, I hear you exclaim, and you repeat twenty times: 'Where is a book so ‘useful?’ 'Where can it be met with?’ I will tell you, and will even produce it to you, whenever you chuse to have it. And as there is no great wisdom required in the composition, but only Nature and common sense; I will without evasion tell you I am myself the Author. We call it the ‘Castle Evening.’ The subject of it is, a good mother retired to the castle with her three children, the eldest of whom is only seven years old, and who every evening, if they are very good, tells them a little story.