_THE CONSERVATISM OF CHILDREN._
Here, as girl's duty is, Timarete lays down her cymbals,
Places the ball that she loved, carries the net of her hair;
Maiden, and bride to be, her maids[26] to maid Artemis renders,
And with her favorites too offers their various wardrobe.
_Greek Anthology._
As the light-footed and devious fancy of childhood, within its assigned
limits, easily outstrips the grave progress of mature years, so the
obedience of children is far more scrupulous not to overstep the
limits of the path. It is a provision of nature, in order to secure
the preservation of the race, that each generation should begin with
the unquestioning reception of the precepts of that which it follows.
No deputy is so literal, no nurse so Rhadamanthine, as one child left
in charge of another. The same precision appears in the conduct of
sports. The formulas of play are as Scripture, of which no jot or
tittle is to be repealed. Even the inconsequent rhymes of the nursery
must be recited in the form in which they first became familiar; as
many a mother has learned, who has found the versions familiar to her
own infancy condemned as inaccurate, and who is herself sufficiently
affected by superstition to feel a little shocked, as if a sacred canon
had been irreligiously violated.
The life of the past never seems so comprehensible, and the historic
interval never so insignificant, as when the conduct and demeanor of
children are in question. Of all human relations, the most simple and
permanent one is that of parent and child. The loyalty which makes a
clansman account his own interests as trifling in comparison with those
of his chieftain, or subjects consider their own prosperity as included
in their sovereign's, belongs to a disappearing society; the affection
of the sexes is dependent, for the form of its manifestation, on the
varying usages of nations; but the behavior of little children, and of
their parents in reference to them, has undergone small change since
the beginnings of history. Homer might have taken for his model the
nursery of our own day, when, in the words of Achilles' rebuke to the
grief of Patroclus, he places before us a Greek mother and her baby--
Patroclus, why dost thou weep, like a child too young to speak plainly,
A girl who runs after her mother, and cries in arms to be taken,
Catching hold of her garment, and keeping her back from her errand,
Looking up to her tearful, until she pauses and lifts her?