Except for William Blake's Songs of Innocence, literature intended for children is as dreary at the close as at the opening of the century. Various forces at work throughout the century, but with special vigor at the opening and close, had as their avowed object the making over of the child according to preconceived ideas and plans of a moral and religious nature. The Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge had as its province the inculcation of religious and moral precepts among children of the Establishment and, in many instances, of dissenting communities also. The restless activities in dissenting circles had as their chief object the salvaging of the souls of children from the grip of the Devil and all his forces. During the last quarter of the century, the results of awakened interest in scientific matters were painfully obvious in literature intended for children. These publications reveal clearly a tendency to secularize subject matter, but in method show a propagandist spirit that had as its objective the making over of the child into a young savant. In other words, the child at the close of the century was still nurtured on the institutional plan. Where Isaac Watts in the first quarter had been stimulated by religious ideals, Mrs. Barbauld, Aikin, Day, and the Edgeworths in the last quarter were in addition fired by enthusiasm for moral tales which incorporated natural science. Even Newberry, in the middle of the century, was not altruistic in combining the functions of a publisher of children's books with those of a dispenser of patent medicines; and his stories had also their reward

for virtue, and punishment for evil. Unfortunately, Blake's peculiar methods of publication restricted his audience to such an extent that his delightful lyrics for children could not seriously compete with less worthy publications.

While Prior was developing complimentary verse on childhood to its highest perfection in the classicist manner, and while Swift was composing stinging satires on the mechanical use of childhood, non-conformist writers were carrying on propaganda from which emerged in 1720 the Divine Songs for Children and Moral Songs of Isaac Watts. For a proper understanding of this epoch-making contribution to poetry on childhood, it is necessary to notice briefly the religious and social environment from which it sprang.

The characteristic mood of the non-conformists was one of gloom. The doctrine of election led them to practice introspection in order to discover conformity with the wishes of God. They feared the wrath of God because of their sinful nature. Original sin was more than a doctrine; it was a grim reality that stood between them and eternal salvation. Like Donne and his followers in the seventeenth century, they were preoccupied with death and the grave. In their essentially ascetic outlook, the life of the senses was an evil to be avoided if they wished to escape hell fire. They did not allow themselves even the natural love of children, "those tempting things." At the end of the first section of Watts's Horae Lyricae are certain poems "peculiarly dedicated to Divine Love." The first of the group has the title The Hazard of Loving the Creatures. Watts pursues the argument that whatever love is given to friends and relatives leaves so much less for God. Men must control natural instincts in the interests of salvation. This is especially necessary in relation to children.

Nature has soft and powerful bands,
And Reason she controls;

While children with their little hands
Hang closest to our souls.

Thoughtless they act th' old Serpent's part;
What tempting things they be!

Lord, how they twine about our heart,

And draw it off from thee!

Face to face with grim spiritual realities, it was essential that man should fight sin at the source. Salvation was conditioned upon the realization of one's sinful nature. In his thirty-ninth sermon, on the Right Improvement of Life, Watts warns his congregation that "this is the time that was given you for your reconciliation with God, and securing your everlasting interest. All the elect are born into this world sinful and miserable. . . . We are all, by nature . . . under sentence of condemnation." The child is born sinful; therefore it must be made to realize the precarious state in which it lives. It becomes the duty of parents to instruct their children. The growing soul of the parent, doubled in wedlock, and multiplied in children,

Stands but the broader mark for all the mischiefs
That rove promiscuous o'er the mortal stage.

That parents might not become slack in this fundamental matter, clergymen exhorted them in sermons, and as practical helps wrote manuals for use with children. It is at this point that we meet Janeway in the seventeenth century and Watts in the eighteenth. '

1

1 See John Ashton's Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne, vol. I, p. 184. Ashton quotes from the lost and found columns of a periodical: "Taken from a child, a gold chain with this motto, Memento Mori."

As the writer of this study holds in his hand a little yellow book, wrinkled and faded with age, there rises from its pages a spirit of earnestness and rigid duty—a gloomy sincerity of purpose. It was written by James Janeway, and is entitled A Token for Children, being an exact account of the conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children (1671-1672).

In this little manual for children, Janeway appeals to parents: "Take some time daily to speak a little to your children one by one about their miserable condition by nature. I know a child that was converted by this sentence from a godly schoolmistress in the country: 'Every mother's child of you are by nature children of wrath.' Put your children upon learning their catechism, and the Scriptures, and getting to pray and weep by themselves after Christ." Janeway is sufficiently specific and picturesque to command attention: "And dare you neglect so direct a command? Are the souls of your children of no value? Are you willing that they should be brands of hell? Are you indifferent whether they be damned or saved? Shall the devil run away with them without control? Will you not use your utmost endeavor to deliver them from the wrath to come?" And he proceeds more directly to children themselves by stating, "They are not too little to die. . . . They are not too little to go to hell." Example One contains these sentences: "Miss Sarah Howley-when she was between eight and nine years old, was carried by her friends to hear a sermon, where the minister preached upon Mat. 11, 31— My yoke is easy and my burden is light. In the applying of which Scripture, this child was highly awakened, and made deeply sensible of the condition of her soul." In the following sentence there is direct testimony to show what' was expected of children at the age of eight: "O mother,

said she, it is not any particular sin of omission or commission, that sticks so close to my conscience, as the sin of my nature; without the blood of Christ, that will damn me."

The poems of Isaac Watts were composed in this tradition. Several of his songs persist in twentieth-century anthologies of children's lyrics. He has a niche in the "Lives" of Johnson, who in the condescending manner he often assumed toward schoolmasters and matters pertaining to children, holds that Watts is "at least one of the few poets with whom youth and ignorance may be safely pleased." Taking further notice of the divine's preoccupation with childhood, Johnson writes that Watts "condescended to lay aside the scholar, the philosopher, and the wit, to write little poems of devotion, and systems of instruction, adapted to their wants and capacities, from the dawn of reason through its gradations of advance in the morning of life. Every man, acquainted with the common principles of human action, will look with veneration on the writer, who is at one time combating Locke, and at another making a catechism for children in their fourth year. A voluntary descent from the dignity of science is perhaps the hardest lesson that humility can teach." He credits Watts with having overcome the blunt, coarse, and inelegant style of the dissenters by showing them that “zeal and purity might be expressed and enforced by polished diction." It was by Johnson's recommendation that the poems of Watts were included in the collection for which Johnson wrote his "Lives."

Watts was indeed an innovator. He defied Calvinistic tradition in many ways, but always successfully, as the vogue of his books in the eighteenth century indicates. In composing his hymns it was necessary to ignore the embargo Calvin had laid on everything but metrical psalms and canticles. Although hampered also by the dearth of