Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 2 1884.djvu/253

 Rh are not inferior but superior to those of their elders. The rapidity with which they acquire languages is a case in point. There was Probably nothing phenomenal in the fact of John Stuart Mill's reading Greek with facility when he was five years old, though, of course, the desirability of thus forcing the willing brain of infancy is another question. Mr. Newell mentions the elaborate and most difficult languages which children will sometimes make out of their own heads. The amusement is not unknown in England,—one instance of it has come under my personal notice; but it seems to be still more in favour in America, and the examples cited of the "cat" and other strange tongues are not a little curious. With all this astonishing mental activity how is it, asks our author, that nevertheless we see the same identical rhymes and games transmitted, with but few variations, from furthest antiquity, and diffused over the face of continents? The explanation he proposes seems to be a very just one. By the side of the inventiveness of children has to be reckoned their inherent conservatism. No new-fangled toy, for instance, however perfect in mechanical ingenuity, will ever give the amount of pleasure afforded by the immemorial doll. Mr. Newell calls to mind some early allusions to that indispensable adjunct to little-girl life: amongst others, the exquisite lines from the Greek anthology that refer to the custom which required of a little girl who had reached the years of discretion (seven years is said to have been the all too-early term) to offer her "maids," as her dolls were called, at the altar of her heavenly patroness, Athene or Artemis, Diana or Venus, as the case might be. Mr. Newell might have added to his citations what has always struck me as a rather pathetic reference to the antique doll, that; namely, of Plutarch, who says, in proof of the angelic goodness of his short-lived little daughter Timoxena, "when she was very young she would frequently beg of her nurse to give the breast not only to other children but to her babies or dolls, which she considered as her dependents and under her protection."

As with toys so with games. Children respect the ancient ritual out of an almost superstitious veneration. "The formulas of play are scripture, of which no jot or tittle is to be repealed." Thus it happens that there are incipient dramas which, like the first in Mr.