Rx for parents.

The National Review Treasury of Classic Children's Literature, Volume Two, selected by William F. Buckley Jr. (ISI, 517 pp., $29.95)

The National Review Treasury of Classic Bedtime Stories, by Thornton Burgess (ISI, 349 pp., $29.95)

TAKE two NATIONAL REVIEW books, one whose contents are hand-picked by William F. Buckley Jr., ask a National Review Online columnist to review them, and publish the results in NATIONAL REVIEW. Surprise! The reviewer will love the books and urge you to buy them.

To paraphrase Mandy Rice-Davies: "Well, she would, wouldn't she?"

Sure she would. And, in this case, she's absolutely right. NATIONAL REVIEW has published two more lovely children's books and, if you have nice children anywhere in your life, you should buy them.

Designed to be read aloud, the volumes are aesthetically pleasing, with smooth stock, an eye-friendly typeface, and heft that is substantial without putting a strain on parental wrists. That is their material nature; their spirit is something more wonderful altogether. Let me start with my children's favorite of the two. In recent evenings my nine- and seven-year-olds and I have road-tested a substantial portion of Treasury of Classic Children's Literature, Volume Two, and I haven't heard a complaint yet. It's a shame, really, because some nights one is desperate to get the little blighters into bed. But what I invariably hear, when we've trundled to the end of a story, is, "Aw, one more, Mummy, please!"

This particular Treasury is a WFB-selected compendium of rollicking and intelligently written stories, many of which first appeared in St. Nicholas Magazine in the late 19th century. In delightful pre-modern fashion, the tales abound with officious clerks, prideful kings, guilty, submissive wives, and idle poets--but also with saucy princesses, Parcheesi-playing princes, and a "poor, sensitive, lonely orphan" lion. Tom Sawyer makes an appearance, as does Mowgli, but in the main the characters will be new to young ears.

Adults have fairly strict narrative expectations--i's must be dotted and t's crossed--but children don't care if a story meanders. If an adventure is set up in great detail in one minutely observed location only to drift off and end somewhere else entirely, dropping half the characters on the way, well, they love it. This kind of storytelling conforms and appeals to the child's imagination, where weirder is better and there's no need for a tidy literary end.

More important still, for a real child-pleaser, is unswerving observance of how people actually are. In my experience, children intuitively share the conservative acceptance that people come in all sorts (whereas left-wingers believe we should be corrected and improved and our unpleasant attributes either ignored or blamed on someone else). The Treasury stories are rich in this understanding. Thus we get this, from a story called "Pigs Is Pigs": "He was a normal boy and therefore always had a guilty conscience when his father was angry. So the boy slipped quietly around the house. There is nothing so soothing to a guilty conscience as to be out of the path of the avenger." Or this, from "The Poison Bubble": "The baron was greatly surprised--as people are usually surprised when others refuse to do things that they have been in the habit of doing whether they ought to or not--and he resolved to punish the villagers."

Unfortunately children today are conditioned to expect that all deserving characters receive some sort of reward; there's a story in this book, "The Rhyme for Twelfth," in which a feckless poet-poseur fails to produce a birthday verse for a young princess and by an odd turn of events winds up married to a wealthy and beautiful queen in another kingdom. My children were pleased for the poet's sake, but dismayed that the royal child never got her rhyme. It is also true that not all children will be receptive to the curiosities and charm of such a book as this. If you're buying Christmas presents for gum-snapping, PG-13-watching, GameCube-playing toughies, it may be too late and you should probably buy them something with batteries.

With any luck, though, you can catch them young, and for this I must recommend the Treasury of Classic Bedtime Stories. The book is ever-so-slightly misnamed, for these are not the greatest hits of nursery reading, with Goodnight Moon and suchlike, but a collection of Thornton Burgess's folksy animal stories. There's an Uncle Remus-like cadence to his writing that I initially mistook for Southern dialect, but Burgess came from Cape Cod, lived there all his life. New England salty-talk is amazingly similar to a Mississippi drawl when it's written down.

The Burgess tales feature crafty foxes, gun-toting farm boys, world-weary buzzards, fast-talking woodchucks, and frogs with wanderlust, and they are justly loved by generations of small children. I noticed while reading aloud the adventures of Reddy Fox that my nine- and two-year-olds both drifted off to do other things, whereas the almost-four- and seven-year-olds were glued to my shoulders, leaning in to see the old-fashioned illustrations by Harrison Cady. That will give you an idea of the age range to which the book appeals.

The Bedtime Treasury is divided into ten sections--each dealing with the scandals and adventures of one creature, say, Jerry Muskrat--and then subdivided into digestible bits. So when your saucereyed children or grandchildren beg for "just one more, please!" you, beneficent reader, can continue the story for as long, or as briefly, as you like. Much as one loves to read aloud to children, there comes the time when they really must go to bed, and a book like this--indeed, like both of these--is ideal for settling them there happily.

Meghan Cox Gurdon is a columnist for National Review Online.