Entered, according to act of Congress, in the year 1840, By REV. JOHN L. BLAKE, D. D. 'n the Clerk's Office of the Southern District Court of New-York. PREFACE. 3 ОМ "Is it true?-a child asks, when you tell him a wonderful tory that strikes his imagination." This remark of Mrs. Barbauld is placed at the beginning of the Juvenile Companion, as having an immediate bearing upon an important fact in intellec tual philosophy, which, to say the least, has not been sufficiently regarded in works designed for the young. The writer of fiction has the unlimited command of events and characters yet, the single circumstance of truth-that the events related really came to pass-counterbalances, with respect to interest, all the privileges of the former, and in a mind accustomed to exer tion, will throw the advantage on the side of the historian. The author in all his labors for the advancement of education, has endeavored to keep this fact continually in view. The object of this volume is to make the reader acquainted with particularly interesting and important events in history and biography, presuming, that an inclination will thereby be formed in the minds of young persons, for "connected and extensive reading upon those subjects. Morever, in the selection of materials, such have been taken as were of a dicided character, in their moral tendency. Whether a good or bad quality were to be represented, unless it were so strongly marked, that a child would be led of his own accord, and instantaneously, to admire the one, and to abhor the other, it was deemed unfit for use. Thus a literary and a moral purpose is accomplished at the same time, and by the same labor. It is an undoubted truth, that there is no better way to inculcate the principles and the love of what is excellent than by the exhibition of real excellence; and, that there is no better way to guard one against the commission of what is of a contrary character, than by the display, from real life, of mean, vicious, and vile conduct. It is also believed, that the plan of the Juvenile Companion is well calculated to facilitate the art of good reading. Our youth may be furnished with a thousand rules and illustrations of rhetoric, if there were so many, and it would be of no compara. tive value in learning to read, unless the books containing these rules and illustrations, are intelligible and interesting. From such a routine of exercises a natural elocution can never be |