Consider Mr. Badger in The Wind in the Willows–that extraordinary amalgam of high rank, coarse manners, gruffness, shyness, and goodness. The child who has met Mr. Badger has ever afterwards, in its bones, a knowledge of humanity and of English social history which it could not get in any other way.
C. S. Lewis, "On Three Ways of Writing for Children", Of Other Worlds, 1966