some he will play childish games, calling out ' Flask,' 'Axe', while he allows the youngest to fall asleep on his stomach, in spite of the discomfort. The second is old Strepsiades remonstrating with his graceless son: I understood all your baby talk, whatever you wanted I twigged it. If you whispered bru,3 I knew what you meant, I gave you your drink, and you swigged it, If you said mamma I knew you meant bread, and quickly cut you a slice, sir! The moment I heard kakka I was up, and held you out in a trice, sir! If in Greek literature we draw so many blanks and so few prizes, we shall expect still less when we come to Latin. Of Latin writers, perhaps the most universal in their sympathies (at least on the human side) are Plautus (many will think this a paradox and violently disagree), Cicero, and Virgil. Plautus, being a comic writer, has little or nothing to say of the charm of babies, but his interest and sympathy are shown by many references— he seems to have been chiefly struck by their messy little ways. Maternity, however, is nowhere treated with greater dignity and tenderness than in parts of the Amphitruo, in which Plautus is led by his sympathy far beyond the limits of comedy, into regions where his imitators Molière and Dryden were quite unable to follow him. Cicero, as far as I know, has nothing in his voluminous works which comes within our scope, and even the tender Virgil in his sole detailed reference to babyhood is so obscure that the passage has never yet been satisfactorily explained. The meaning apparently is 'Begin tiny babe [all Latin can say is incipe, parve puer !] with a smile to recognise thy mother; begin tiny babe; those who never smiled on their parents [or, on whom their parents never smiled'] no god ever honoured at his board nor goddess with her bed.' The original contains all sorts of defects; the only palliation of the last line is that it may be a reference to some lost nursery saying. The whole seems to me to be one of Virgil's most unhappy efforts. There is a pretty passage in Statius, a poet in whom few would expect to find anything of the romantic spirit-unless they remembered his almost famous lines on Sleep. It runs thus: Meanwhile the babe, in the lap of mother earth Mid the rich verdure, as he crawls about With looks down-bent, lays low the pliant grass : Missing the breast, or smiles, his baby lips For this Latin babies seem to have said bua. His parted lips drink in the breeze: unwitting The scene is the same as that described by Euripides; but Statius has stamped it with the mark of his own individuality. We are left with the tenderest of Roman poets nineteen hundred years ago'; here we find the one perfect expression of babyhood in all Latin literature-surpassing in fact anything even in Greek, except Homer himself; it is therefore all the more unfortunate that Catullus at his best is quite untranslatable. I have searched in vain for any translation which gives at all an adequate idea of the original, here quoted : Torquatus volo parvulus Sit suo similis patri, This is part of an epithalamium for the marriage of one of Catullus's friends, Manlius Torquatus: the whole is remarkable in Latin poetry as being quite uninfluenced by Greek in sentiment and expression; and nowhere more notably so than in the lines quoted, with their perfect simplicity and sincerity, and loving use of the tender diminutives so characteristic of Catullus. As Mackail well remarks, 'not again till the Florentine art of the fifteenth century was the picture drawn with so true and tender a hand.' Sir William Jones, who translated it, paid it rather a left-handed compliment when he declared it worthy of the pencil of Domenichino. I am indebted for the following translation to Mr. J. F. Butler: May we a babe-Torquatus see Dimpled hands outstretched to greet On tiny lips half parted: May all, who else had known not, trace Torquatus' lineage in his face; Like features to his sire's set there His mother's chastity declare, Prove Vinia loyal-hearted. We have to wait fourteen centuries before we recapture this note in Latin lyric. I refer to the charming 'Virgin's Cradlehymn,' which I had prided myself was rather a discovery—until I saw that it had been discovered (and translated !) by Coleridge. Still readers of Coleridge will be glad to have the original : Dormi, Jesu, mater ridet, Quæ tam dulcem somnum, videt, Si non dormis, mater plorat, Inter fila cantans orat: 'Blande, veni, somnule.' (Anon.) It will be seen that Coleridge's version is somewhat free-in fact, it gives rather an inaccurate idea of the Latin. I have therefore ventured to give my own version, which claims only the merit of fidelity, even to an attempt to render the quaint diminutives: It This poem suggests two interesting trains of thought. seems strange that one hears next to nothing of the lullaby in ancient literature. Obviously ancient mothers and nurses must have sung their children to sleep. What did they sing? We do not know the words of an ancient grammarian suggest that with the Greeks it was nothing more than a crooning or humming. The only known Latin lullaby is of scarcely more literary interest. It consists of the word lalla repeated indefinitely: our informant is uncertain whether it meant 'sleep,' or ' take the breast'! When we consider the number of lullabies, literary and popular, of mediæval and modern times, we cannot help feeling that this supports our suspicion that the ancients were not nearly so interested in babies as ourselves. The same applies to fairytales: I think it is certain that classical fairy-tales were few and generally unimaginative-more folk-tale than fairy-tale-i.e., not originally intended for the nursery at all. On the other hand, the Greeks were rich in bogies, hobgoblins (nearly all female !), and all the other fearsome inventions of silly nurses. Once more the suggestion is that the ancient attitude towards young children was far less sympathetic than in mediæval and modern times. My own impression is that the ancients were never sufficiently interested in babies to try to understand them. The other question has reference to the causes of this changed attitude towards infancy. The main factors seem to be two: Christianity and chivalry. Of these Christianity took over from the Jews that higher conception of motherhood, which distinguishes the Jews not only from Greeks and Romans, but from other Orientals. To this was added the influence of the Nativity story, and the teaching and example of our Lord Himself. But, as far as we can see from literature, this never resulted in any radical change in the West in actual feeling towards babies. The question requires the most delicate balancing of evidence, and I only put forward my view tentatively, but I should say that the baby came into his kingdom with the growth of the cult of the Virgin Mary ; in other words, the child was first merely the complement of the mother-it is noteworthy that the vast majority of early lullabies are religious. As this development was taking place, Teutonic influence was already beginning to work in the direction of what finally blossomed out as chivalry. The two influences converged and diverged, but their combined product was the modern conception of babyhood. This is northern, not southern, and, in spite of the genius and productiveness of the southern masters, the true spiritualness and inwardness of motherhood, and implicitly of babyhood, is better expressed by the German and Netherlandish Schools than by the Italian and Spanish, by Dürer and Van Eyck than by Raphael and Murillo. It is after all the 'true and tender of the Northland' which said the last word on babyhood. W. B. SEDGWICK. THE ENGLISH THEATRE OF THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL LITERARY historians generally pass over the dramatic literature of the nineteenth century with more or less indifference as the one region of letters in which Romanticism had failed.' This, perhaps, is true in the sense that those plays which found their way to the stage had not the least pretension to literary or poetic qualities, while those which had any claim to such abiding virtues were as a rule shut out from the theatre. This does not, however, prove that the literary plays were altogether devoid of dramatic qualities: on the contrary, many of them were decidedly superior, even as dramas, to the popular' German horrors,' the romantic spectacles, and the sentimental puerilities that flourished on the stage; and a few of these so-called closet plays-e.g., The Cenci, Sardanapalus, Henriquez-fell short only of the highest perfection. It is, perhaps, not generally recognised to-day against what tremendous odds the poetic playwrights of the age had to contend. The opinion of a contemporary critic may, therefore, be quoted with advantage. Writing in Blackwood's Magazine in 1823, this anonymous author observes that even those [i.e., the serious playwrights] who write for the stage, changed as it is for I maintain that the change is in the stage, and not in the power of writing for it—I think that even some of these, judging by what they have produced in their trammels, might have brought forth pieces not unworthy of at least the second class writers of the sixteenth century, if they had enjoyed the same advantages which those earlier writers possessed. This being understood as distinctly excluding those gentlemen who assist our patent managers in making the public taste even worse than need be; and who are content to act either by the year or by the piece, as illustrators to the work of the decorator and the machinist.1 In the eighteenth century the English stage was almost completely dominated by the classical tradition, which showed 1 Blackwood's Magazine, vol. xiv., p. 560. Allan Cunningham also speaks of the limit put upon dramatic inventions. See preface to Sir Marmaduke Maxwell, P. iv. |