Mrs. Sherwood wrote an extraordinary number of children’s books; many were published by Houlston the Quaker as chap-books.[142] The sternest and most uncompromising dogmatism cannot crush the life out of them, nor weaken the vivid pictures they contain. Her first journey across the hills to Lichfield, when she was a child of four, had made a deeper impression on her mind than all her Indian travels. She had fresher memories of the English hills than of “the Indian Caucasus hanging as brilliant clouds on the horizon”. The quiet inland life that is the chief matter of her autobiography[143] is reflected in most of her stories. She is not concerned with any wider interests; great events pass unnoticed, as they do in some nurseries; but whenever Mrs. Sherwood remembers her Doctrines, she goes back to the Warnings and Examples of the seventeenth century. There is a grim shadow on her nursery wall, and in the midst of the most innocent employments, her little people shrink and cower. This spectre stood over her when she tampered with a book which children of all ages understand and enjoy. She accepted _The Pilgrim’s Progress_ as a part of her creed; her knowledge of it accounts for the fine simplicity of her style. Yet in her _Infant’s Progress from the Valley of Destruction to Everlasting Glory_,[144] there is not a giant nor a castle to atone for her bane on “toys” which the strictest philosopher would pass as harmless and instructive. Her poor little pilgrim suffers a martyrdom of denial in a juvenile Vanity Fair: