"When I was born, I drew in the common air, and fell upon the earth,
which is of like nature, _and the first voice which I uttered was
crying, as all others do_."--_Wisd._ vii. 3.
"Tum porro Puer, ut saevis projectus ab undis
Navita, _nudus, humi jacet_, Infans, indigus omni
Vitali auxilio; cum primum in luminis oras
Nixibus ex alvo matris natura profudit:
_Vagituque locum lugubri complet_, ut aequum est,
Cui tantum in vita restet transire malorum."
_Lucret. De Rer. Nat._, v. 223.
For the benefit of the lady-readers of "N. & Q." I subjoin a translation of
these beautiful lines of Lucretius:
"The infant, as soon as Nature with great pangs of travail hath sent it
forth from the womb of its mother into the regions of light, lies, like
a sailor cast out from the waves, _naked upon the earth_ in utter want
and helplessness; _and fills every place around with mournful wailings_
and piteous lamentation, as is natural for one who has so many ills of
life in store for him, so many evils which he must pass through and
suffer."
"Thou must be patient: we came crying hither;
Thou know'st, the first time that we smell the air,
We wawle and cry--
When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools."--Shakspeare's _Lear_.
"Who remindeth me of the sins of my infancy? 'For in Thy sight none is
pure from sin, not even the infant whose life is but a day upon the
earth.' (Job xxv. 4.) Who remindeth me? Doth not each little infant, in
whom I see what of myself I remember not? What then was my sin? Was it
that I _hung upon the breast and cried_?"--St. Austin, _Confess._, lib.
i. 7.
"For man's sake it should seeme that Nature made and produced all other
creatures besides; though this great favour of hers, so bountifull and
beneficiall in that respect, hath cost them full deere. Insomuch as it
is hard to judge, whether in so doing she hath done the part of a kind
mother, or a hard and cruell stepdame. For first and foremost, of all
other living creatures, man she hath brought forth all naked, and
cloathed him with the good and riches of others. To all the rest she
hath given sufficient to clad them everie {344} one according to their
kind; as namely shells, cods, hard hides, prickes, shagge, bristles,
haire, downe, feathers, quils, skailes, and fleeces of wool. The verie
trunkes and stemmes of trees and plants, shee hath defended with bark
and rind, yea, and the same sometime double against the injuries both
of heat and cold: man alone, poore wretch, she hath laid _all naked
upon the bare earth, even on his birth-day, to cry and wraule presently
from the very first houre that he is borne into this world_: in suche
sort as, _among so many living creatures, there is none subject to shed
teares and weepe like him. And verily to no babe or infant is it given
once to laugh before he be fortie daies old_, and that is counted verie
early and with the soonest.... The child of man thus untowardly borne,
and who another day is to rule and command all other, loe how he lyeth
bound hand and foot, weeping and crying, and beginning his life with
miserie, as if he were to make amends and satisfaction by his
punishment unto Nature, for this onely fault and trespass, that he is
borne alive."--Plinie's _Naturall Historie_, by Phil. Holland, Lond.
1601, fol., intr. to b. vii.
The following queries are extracted from Sir Thomas Browne's "Common-place
Books," _Aristotle, Lib. Animal._:
"Whether till after forty days children, though they cry, weep not; or,
as Scaliger expresseth it, 'Vagiunt sed oculis siccis.'
"Whether they laugh not upon tickling?
"Why, though some children have been heard to cry in the womb, _yet so
few cry at their birth_, though their heads be out of the
womb?"--Bohn's ed. iii. 358.
Thompson follows Pliny, and says that man is "taught _alone_ to weep"
("Spring," 350.); but--not to speak of the
"Cruel crafty crocodile,
Which, in false grief hiding his harmful guile,
Doth weep full sore and sheddeth tender tears,"
as Spenser sings--the camel weeps when over-loaded, and the deer when
chased sobs piteously. Thompson himself in a passage he has stolen from
Shakspeare, makes the stag weep:
----"he stands at bay;
_The big round tears_ run down his dappled face;
He groans in anguish."--Autumn, 452.
"Steller relates this of the _Phoca Ursina_, Pallas of the camel, and
Humboldt of a small American monkey."--Laurence _On Man_, Lond. 1844,
p. 161.
Risibility, and a sense of the ridiculous, is generally considered to be
the property of man, though _Le Cat_ states that he has seen a chimpanzee
laugh.
The notion with regard to a child crying at baptism has been already
touched on in these pages, Vol. vi., p. 601.; Vol. vii., p. 96.
Grose (quoted in Brand) tells us there is a superstition that a child who
does not cry when sprinkled in baptism will not live; and the same is
recorded in Hone's _Year-Book_.