I don't propose to be a Meddlesome Mattie, but . . .
When in 1910 Theodore Roosevelt thus roared at his rebellious protégé, William Howard Taft, most U. S. citizens knew instantly what he meant. Through the latter half of the 19th Century most of the nation's schoolchildren learned about Meddlesome Mattie, many another moral, immoral or amoral character in William Holmes McGuffey's famed series of Eclectic Readers. Today McGuffey's Eclectics have vanished from most schoolrooms but William Holmes McGuffey lives on as the hero of a nostalgic cult unique in educational history....
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