I, like many other children born in the last two hundred years, have grown up reading stories by Comtesse de Ségur. Looking back, I share the popular opinion that compared with the Grimm Brothers or Arabian Nights the stories are dreadful, but books involving beauteous ethereal spirits and glitt'ring dressing-gowns still cause me a special kind of thrill. I don't know exactly why because I read and was read to quite a lot of fairy-tales when I was a child and don't regard others with the same special consideration. I must thus admit that while I was reading The Rape of the Lock, I gradually became more interested in the Machinery than in the satire. It was a wonderful book either way, though I wish Pope had written fairy-tales.