Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/594

16, 1860.] convictions, it is not possible for the whole world, of either sex, to keep them down. Meantime, I do not know that self-respecting and benevolent women can have a better example or encouragement than Elizabeth Blackwell, with her silent determination, her indomitable fortitude, and her womanly mind and manners, shown in her quiet dress, her gentle demeanour, her steady industry, her devotedness to the suffering, and her life-long practical testimony to social right and feminine duty. The women of all civilised nations may be thankful for her as the Representative of an ever-enlarging class. 2em

acorns you can’t have oaks. When you speak of cocks and hens you imply chickens. If you would enrich the world with an Epic poem (not that I particularly wish to see any addition to that class of literature), you must begin by writing, or at any rate by arranging in your head the two first lines. So of men and women. When you speak of Shakspere you imply a baby, yes! there was a moment when William Shakspere was little Willy in long clothes. No doubt nurse Dorothy, or—if the family, as some commentators suppose, were not very rich—good Mrs. Shakspere herself, took the little Willy in question out in her arms, and strolled with him along the banks of placid Avon. King Lears, and Hamlets, and Othellos as yet lay latent somewhere about the region of the pia mater in that remarkable child, but I have no doubt that he sucked his little fat thumbs much as other babies are wont to do. It is also probable that good Mrs. Shakspere, like other mothers—God bless them all—talked that sublimest sense, mother’s-nonsense, to the boy, and in her beatific visions saw him in her mind’s eye—it is only mothers who dare to draw on the future for such portentous sums—Lord Mayor of London. If so, she was wrong, as poor mothers sometimes are. Little William missed the Civic Chair.

The ingenious French writers who get up those mendacious books about the First Napoleon, are very eager to tell us that when the infant was just born, in the confusion of the moment, and by pure accident, he was placed upon a tapestry on which the skill of the artist had represented some terrible feats of arms. It might have been the doings of the Argonauts under the command of that filibustering fellow Jason; it might have been the battle of the Amazons, or of the Centaurs and Lapithæ; my recollection only serves me so far that I can assert with perfect confidence that the Napoleon tapestry in one form or another represented Broken Heads, an antique. Now they would have us believe that a wise spectator could have translated the contortions, and whinings, and squeakings of that troublesome child into some such phraseology as this—''En avant la Garde! Nom de—nom de—nom de tonnerre. Affrontons la mitraille. Soldats, la victoire est la-bas prête à nous verser des petite verres, allons trinquer avec elle.—Nom de soixante mille cochons—la Garde en avant.'' I do not believe that this was the case, but that little Napoleon bawled upon that occasion simply because he felt rather cold, and would have been glad of a little milk in the usual way.

I am about to offer a few remarks upon the subject of children in general and London children—the Small Things of London—in particular; but although anxious to begin at the beginning, I cannot say that I in any way sympathise with those excellent people who can make out so many fine things from the whinings of babyhood. English mothers forgive me, I don’t like a baby. Mrs. Fondlechild, I know exactly what you are about to say; I was once a baby myself, and I will add that, according to my own view of the case, I must then have been a most objectionable atom. I should not have liked myself. I should not have wished to have been given myself to hold. I should have shrunk from touching myself. I would not have called myself a “Pobsy-Wobsy,” nor would I have admired my own pink toes. I could not with a clear conscience have asserted of myself that “bless my little heart I was the very image of papa.” I never could see the smallest resemblance between an infant and a stout middle-aged gentleman with a hooked nose and spectacles. This, however, but adds to the unpayable debt of gratitude we all owe to our mothers; but for female protection during those months of human jelly-dom, what would become of us! Nay, gentlest motherhood apart, are not all women ex officio protectors of helpless infancy? By some mysterious law of nature they appear to rejoice in human duodecimos at the very time they are most distasteful to me; and, I believe, if they would make a clean breast of it, to most of my fellows. The little creature that has a cap on, and cries in a sort of basket is to them a cameo, or a choice engraving. They see its points, and love to handle it. For myself I must say that I am distinctly afraid of a baby.

I do, however, most thoroughly see the beauty of the mother holding her child in her arms, or to her breast—(so I am not asked to touch it)—and I think it was well that this combination was selected as the favourite subject of Christian artists in the middle ages. But—here I fall back upon the subject of pretty little Mrs. Buttercup, of Number Blank, Blank Square—it is certainly the mother and not the child who exacts my tribute of admiration. Assume the baby to be absent, I should be well content to spend half-an-hour in Mrs. B.’s agreeable society; assume Mrs. B. to be absent, I would as soon spend half-an-hour with a young rook as with the baby. Baby so far plays into the hands of an æsthetic friend of the family that he is the unconscious instrument of educing very beautiful forms of expression upon Mrs. B.’s pure and gentle features, and he can conjure a look out of her eye which never, as I believe, fell to poor Buttercup’s lot, even when he had pulled her up fifteen miles against stream in the gladsome days of wooing and pink bonnets—just allowing himself time for a little beer on passing the locks. I never could see any poetry in the staring blue eyes of babyhood, although fully aware that, according to the doctrines of the true faith upon the Angelina model, we are required to believe that baby has recently quitted the realms aloft, and does not like its new quarters upon the