"
On the whole, authorship does not seem to foster the quality of
imagination. Convention, during certain early years, may be a very
strong motive--not so much with children brought up strictly within its
limits, perhaps, as with those who have had an exceptional freedom.
Against this, as a kind of childish bohemianism, there is, in one phase
of childhood, a strong reaction. To one child, brought up
internationally, and with somewhat too much liberty amongst peasant play-
mates and their games, in many dialects, eagerness to become like "other
people," and even like the other people of quite inferior fiction, grew
to be almost a passion. The desire was in time out-grown, but it cost
the girl some years of her simplicity. The style is not always the
child.
LETTERS
The letter exacted from a child is usually a letter of thanks; somebody
has sent him a box of chocolates. The thanks tend to stiffen a child's
style; but in any case a letter is the occasion of a sudden
self-consciousness, newer to a child than his elders know. They speak
prose and know it. But a young child possesses his words by a different
tenure; he is not aware of the spelt and written aspect of the things he
says every day; he does not dwell upon the sound of them. He is so
little taken by the kind and character of any word that he catches the
first that comes at random.
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