exulting sense of vitality and the experiences of the doomed offspring of invalid parents? The time comes when we have learned to understand the music of sorrow, the beauty of resigned suffering, the holy light that plays over the pillow of those who die before their time, in humble hope and trust. But it is not until he has worked his way through the period of honest, hearty animal existence, which every robust child should make the most of, not until he has learned the use of his various faculties, which is his first duty, that a boy of courage and animal vigor is in a proper state to read these tearful records of premature decay. I have no doubt that disgust is implanted in the minds of many healthy children by early surfeits of pathological piety. I do verily believe that He who took children in His arms and blessed them loved the healthiest and most playful of them just as well as those who were richest in the tuberculous virtues. I know what I am talking about, and there are more parents in this country who will be willing to listen to what I say than there are fools to pick a quarrel with me. In the sensibility and the sanctity which often accompany premature decay I see one of the most beautiful instances of the principle of compensation which marks the divine benevolence. But to get the spiritual hygiene for robust natures out of the exceptional regimen of invalids is just simply what we professors call ‘bad practice’; and I know by experience that there are worthy people who not only try it on their own children, but actually force it on those of their neighbors.”
Besides the books already mentioned in Thomas’s catalogue, there were “The Friendly Instructor: a Companion for Young Ladies and Gentlemen, with a Preface by the Rev. Dr. Doddridge” (1746), “Letters of Advice from a Father to his Son just setting out in the World” (1753), “The New Book of Knowledge” (1764), for which Isaiah Thomas when but a boy of fifteen engraved the cuts himself, Goldsmith’s “Vicar of Wakefield,” which was reprinted in Boston in 1767, and Watts’s “Divine Songs” in 1771. There were also a few spelling and other school books.
All this time, all through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the mother country was the chief source, both by way of exporting books to the colonies and furnishing matter for reprinting, of our supply of literature of every kind, including, of course, books for the young. Fully three-fourths of every New England library consisted of books by English men of letters, either published in England or reprinted over here; and thus there was little or no room for the encouragement of native talent.
“All that our youth knew of theology, and much of his knowledge of reading,” says Mr. MacMaster in his “History of the People of the United States,” was gained with the help of “The New England Primer,” a book undoubtedly of English origin, as Mr. Paul Leicester Ford, in his admirable monograph on the subject, makes abundantly clear.” “Compiled by ministers of the gospel for the children of Puritan parents,” says another writer, “it was familiarly known to them as ‘the little Bible of New England.’ ... In the days of Whitefield fathers of families laid the Primer on the same shelf with the Bible and the almanack, and pious mothers assembled quarterly to refresh their memories from its pages. Containing certain famous forms of prayer, it was daily used by President John Adams throughout his long career.” J. T. Buckingham, the Boston printer, relates that when he bought a “New England Primer” no speculator who makes his thousands with a dash of his pen ever felt richer than he did then. “There is not,” says Mr. MacMaster, “and there never was, a textbook so richly deserving a history as the Primer. The earliest mention of it in print, now known, is to be found in
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