Complete. From “Essays and Marginalia.”

A WHIMSICAL old bachelor acquaintance of mine—less wit than humorist, more pendant than either; whose tediousness is tolerated by men who like their naps after dinner, because he can talk without listeners; and his ugliness endured by women who are mothers, because he is rather fond of babies—maintained, a few days ago, with a paradoxical gravity of countenance peculiar to himself, that the common playthings of children are all derived from the first ages of the world, and were originally of a religious or commemorative character.

  Of the ninepins, he remarked that nine had ever been a mystic number, much regarded in magical operations and cabalistic lore; that it was the square of three, and the number of the Muses; that the Fates, the Furies, and the Graces, make up exactly nine; that nine, multiplied by seven, a like numerical mystery, produced the grand climacteric sixty-three. He was disposed to think that the ninepins were intended by the ancient sages to represent Time, whose triple denominations of Past, Present, and Future, are continually involved, and, as it were, multiplied into each other; while the spherical form, and the solidity of the bowl, clearly figured eternity, by which the divisions of time were to be finally supplanted. He referred the invention of the game to the Celtic bards and Druids, whose leashes of triads are well known to the Cymrodorion Society, and who taught the transmigration of the soul through nine cycles of existence, before it attained perfection. The wooden rocking-horse was an invaluable document, confirming the descent of the aboriginal Britons from the remnant of Troy. The poor infant’s coral he condemned as useless, heathenish, and popish; useless, because all animals except man, and possibly the hammer-headed shark, cut their teeth without it: heathenish and popish, inasmuch as it was nothing more than the Fascinum, or amulet of pagan Rome, worn by the Ancients to avert fascination, with the addition of bells, those tintinnabular terrors of Satan, whose thaumaturgic sound, as holy friars have told, could disperse a coming thunderstorm, make the air wholesome, and procure a safe passage for the parting soul. The rattle, though not, to his knowledge, ever patronized by the Church of Rome, was of classic sanctity, being much used in the rites of the Syrian goddess, and of the mother of the gods; it was the crepitaculum of the towered Berecynthia, and the crotala of the inexorable Nemesis. (This piece of learning he gleaned from the notes on “Childe Harold,” Canto IV.)

  “The literature of the nursery,” he continued, waxing so earnest that I suspected him of being half convinced by his own irony (as some, by feigning sleep, have sunk into a sincere snore), “the literature of the nursery has every mark of extreme antiquity; an antiquity far beyond the reach of chronology or written records. Oral tradition, a musical accompaniment, a quaint simplicity of phrase, a number of allusions to forgotten circumstances; a variety of readings (the variæ lectiones in the metrical romances of ‘Old Father Long-Legs,’ ‘Jack a Manory,’ etc., would fill a respectable sheet in the Museum Criticum); a prevalence of the supernatural; combined with those little details of familiar and domestic things, which make the ‘Odyssey’ so interesting; above all, the utter uncertainty—nay, the absence of so much as a rumor as to the author of those truly popular compositions—these are characteristics that can meet only in the productions of the remotest era; such as our lullabys, nurses’ songs, and dandling ditties, unquestionably are. The very rhythm and melody of the verse bespeak them of the time when music, dance, and poetry went hand in hand. The air is strictly imitative; that is to say, significant which can scarce be said of modern music in general.

  “Then, what poetry is so universally diffused as these ancient strains—these lilting lays—these soft and slumberous rocking rhymes? How many thousands, even in this educated generation, never heard of ‘Paradise Lost,’ or the ‘Fairy Queene’! but who is unacquainted with ‘Jack Horner’ and little ‘Tom Tucker’? Who has not sympathized with the sorrows of ‘Billy Pringle’? How circumscribed is the fame of Pegasus and Bellerophon to that of the ‘Cow that Jumped over the Moon.’ So intimately intertwined are these madrigals with the fibres of the brain, that it is not without effort we remember that they must all have been made at some time by somebody. We rather deem them like the song of birds, ‘a natural product of the air.’

  “I know that, in this printing age of ours, several collections of these poetical antiquities have been published by ‘the trade.’ I have been applied to myself by an eminent London house to superintend an edition of the ‘Poetæ Minimi,’ the Muse in swaddling clothes, with notes, illustrations, and prolegomena; and as a specimen I have actually seen the moral ballad, ‘Three Children Sliding on the Ice,’ and the spirited dithyrambic, ‘Ride a Cock-Horse,’ in the original Greek. But I think these effusions should never be printed. They were originally derived from an age anterior to letters; and they still pertain to the unlettered part of human life. To see them in types is like looking at a glow worm in the sun. But what is more lamentable, there is a profuse issue of new-fangled nursery books, meretriciously tricked out with gaudy colored prints, and bearing internal evidence that they are manufactured by gentlemen of the press. Surely, as ‘the world is all before them’ where to do mischief, they might let the babies alone. Everything nowadays must be done by the press, or the steam engine, and all by wholesale. Ere long the cradle will be banished from the fireside, like the spinning wheel; and the rising generation will be consigned from their birth to national establishments. Suckling of infants will be exploded, as unproductive labor. Pap will be made by contract in subscription soup-kettles. A single engine will put in motion as many cradles as spindles; and official nurses, appointed by the committee, will sing ‘Songs of Reason’ to the grinding of a steam apollonicon. Yet notwithstanding the unquiet innovations of your all-in-all educationists, who would make your little ones read before they can well speak, spoiling their dear lisp with abominable words; which, poor things, they pronounce so right, it is heart-breaking to hear them,—cramming them, it may be, with the theory of animal mechanics, when they should be feeling their life in every limb—there is still, thank heaven, and the kind, sensible hearts of English mothers, a genial feeling of old times about a nursery. When I see a numerous small family at play, my mind sinks back, through dream and vision, to the world’s infancy. In the life, the innocence, the simple bliss before me, I hail a something that is not changed. The furniture of the well-littered playroom reminds me of Chaldea, Egypt, Etruria, and the Druids; so that, were it not for the rosy faces of the darlings, and the grisette prettiness of the prim, smiling nurse-maiden, with her ringlets just out of paper, peeping so alluringly from beneath her coiffure of curious needlework, which, though very winsome, is not strictly classical, I might imagine myself in the museum of the Antiquarian Society, of which I have the honor not to be a member; while the strange and affecting analogy between childhood, as it still appears, and what we conceive of man, in the simple days of yore, ‘when human hope was bold and strong, nor feared the cold rebuke of memory,’ ofttimes gives rise to reflections which leave me better acquainted with myself, and with kindlier feelings towards my species.

  It was evident that my friend had talked himself quite serious, for he was running into blank verse. And truly, in his peroration, amid the umbrageous multitude of words, there were certain lunar gleams of sense. The world’s infancy is something more than a figure of speech. There is analogy between the growth of the individual mind, and the development of the public soul in communities. If we except the helpless, unremembered state of babyhood, there is no stage of the individual life which has not its parallel in the annals of the kind. There is a boyhood of nations, when the joy and pride of man is like that of a vigorous schoolboy; in bodily strength, in the pursuit and capture of animals; in running, riding, swimming, wrestling, and all perfections of bones and sinews. Then comes the amorous, romantic youth; the age of gallantry and chivalry, fond of splendor and marvel; eager as childhood, but more imaginative, more disputatious, more impassioned. This is succeeded by the peculiar age of poetry; when its heroic and romantic themes are but just remembered, and its wonders but half believed, the poet comes and gives them a mausoleum in the imagination. Next succeeds the busy, calculating manhood of society; the age of common sense, prudential ethics, satire, and “vile criticism”; the age of the Aristotles, Horaces, Boileaus, and Popes; of all ages the most presumptuous, despising all that has gone before; wise in its own conceit, not, like noble youth, in the strong passion of imagined certainty, but in the cold vacuity of skepticism and scorn. After this, is the sere and yellow leaf; when men and nations begin to review their days, and finding little to approve in the short-sighted wisdom of latter times, recur, with something of a tender piety, or it may be with a fond idolatry, even to the green and childish issue of their nonage. Such, methinks, is the present state of Britain; and our national taste may best be typified by an old man reading again the fairy tales that delighted his childhood, the amorous stories that engaged his youth, the first plays he had seen, the poems he had first got by heart; striving to recall the age of hope by spells of memory, and loving best the things he has known the longest.