Reynard the Fox, in Words of One Syllable. By Samuel
Phillips Day. (Cassell, Potter, and Grdpin.)—The self-imposed necessity of rejecting all words of more than one syllable, with the exception of proper names, has cramped Mr. Day's style, and made it clumsy and involved in many places. It is a worse fault in the book that several of the monosyllabic words it employs are much more difficult for a child to understand than the longer words for which they are substituted. Most children know what a badger is, but they do not recognize it as a brook. Then we have "serfs" instead of subjects, " view "instead of presence, "sheen " instead of slippery, "sept " instead of kinsman. All this shows that Mr. Day has proceeded on a wrong principle, and has gone out of his way to give trouble to himself and his readers.
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