THE GENERAL PREFACE. THERE is no employment more tiresome and dull than the beginning of learning to read, and although few of us can recollect the days when we first learnt our letters, or began to put them together, yet we may remember the time perhaps, when, though we could tell the words in an easy book, with no great trouble, we could not put them so together as to make sense of them, and be able to travel, as it were, with the person who wrote the book, through all the scenes to which he wishes to take his reader. Now it would be very well for us to divide the world of readers into several classes, and for each of you, my little people, to ask yourselves which is the class to which you belong? |