The Children

								

wedding of a maid of five years old--a curious thing, but not, evidently,
an occasion of sensibility.  Another time he stands by, in a French
hospital, while a youth of less than nine years of age undergoes a
frightful surgical operation "with extraordinary patience."  "The use I
made of it was to give Almighty God hearty thanks that I had not been
subject to this deplorable infirmitie."  This is what he says.
See, moreover, how the fashion of hurrying childhood prevailed in
literature, and how it abolished little girls.  It may be that there were
in all ages--even those--certain few boys who insisted upon being
children; whereas the girls were docile to the adult ideal.  Art, for
example, had no little girls.  There was always Cupid, and there were the
prosperous urchin-angels of the painters; the one who is hauling up his
little brother by the hand in the "Last Communion of St. Jerome" might be
called Tommy.  But there were no "little radiant girls."  Now and then an
"Education of the Virgin" is the exception, and then it is always a
matter of sewing and reading.  As for the little girl saints, even when
they were so young that their hands, like those of St. Agnes, slipped
through their fetters, they are always recorded as refusing importunate
suitors, which seems necessary to make them interesting to the mediaeval
mind, but mars them for ours.
So does the hurrying and ignoring of little-girl-childhood somewhat
hamper the delight with which readers of John Evelyn admire his most
admirable Mrs. Godolphin.  She was Maid of Honour to the Queen in the
Court of Charles II.  She was, as he prettily says, an Arethusa "who
passed through all those turbulent waters without so much as the least
stain or tincture in her christall."  She held her state with men and
maids for her servants, guided herself by most exact rules, such as that
of never speaking to the King, gave an excellent example and instruction
to the other maids of honour, was "severely careful how she might give
the least countenance to that liberty which the gallants there did
usually assume," refused the addresses of the "greatest persons," and was
as famous for her beauty as for her wit.  One would like to forget the
age at which she did these things.  When she began her service she was
eleven.  When she was making her rule never to speak to the King she was
not thirteen.
Marriage was the business of daughters of fourteen and fifteen, and
heroines, therefore, were of those ages.  The poets turned April into
May, and seemed to think that they lent a grace to the year if they
shortened and abridged the spring of their many songs.  The particular
year they sang of was to be a particularly fine year, as who should say a
fine child and forward, with congruous syntax at two years old, and
ellipses, figures, and tropes.  Even as late as Keats a poet would not
have patience with the process of the seasons, but boasted of untimely