CHILDISH PRECOCITY
_Where babies, much to their surprise,
Were born astonishingly wise;
With every Science on their lips,
And Latin at their finger-tips._
--_Bab Ballads. W. S. Gilbert, 1877._
The seventeenth century was in Europe a period of eager development
and hasty harvesting; English boys were made serious-minded by the
conditions they saw around them, as well as by a forcing-house
system of education, begun at very early years. This early ageing
is reflected in the writings of the times. The _Religio Medici_,
apparently the composition of a man of the large experience and
serene contemplation of extreme age, was written by Sir Thomas
Browne when he was but thirty.
[Illustration: Samuel Torrey, Twelve Years Old, 1770]
There are many records of the precocity of children, preserved for
us many times, alas! through the sad recounting of early deaths. One
of the most pathetic records of a father's blasted hopes may be
found in the pages of the diary of John Evelyn. In December, 1658,
died his little son, Richard, five years and three days old. He was
a prodigy of wit and learning, as beautiful as an angel, and of rare
mental endowment. His father's account of his acquirements runs
thus:--
"He had learned all his catechism at two years and a half old;
he could perfectly read any of the English, Latin, French, or
Gothic letters, pronouncing the first three languages exactly.
He had, before the fifth year, or in that year, not only skill
to read most written hands, but to decline all the nouns,
conjugate the verbs regular, and most of the irregular; learned
out Puerelis, got by heart almost the entire vocabulary of Latin
and French primitives and words, could make congruous syntax,
turn English into Latin, and vice versa, construe and prove what
he read, and did the government and use of relatives, verbs,
substantives, ellipses and many figures and tropes, and made
a considerable progress in Comenius' Janua; begun himself to
write legibly and had a strong passion for Greek. The number of
verses he could recite was prodigious, and what he remembered of
the parts of plays which he would also act; and, when seeing a
Plautus in one's hand, he asked what book it was, and being told
it was comedy and too difficult for him, he wept for sorrow.
Strange was his apt and ingenious application of fables and
morals, for he had read Æsop; he had a wonderful disposition
to mathematics, having by heart divers propositions of Euclid
that were read to him in play, and he would make lines and
demonstrate them. He had learned by heart divers sentences
in Latin and Greek which on occasion he would produce even
to wonder. He was all life, all prettiness, far from morose,
sullen, or childish in any thing he said or did."
Of course this is not given as an ordinary education of an every-day
child. It is an extraordinary record of a very unusual child, but
it shows what an intelligent child could be permitted to do. Evelyn
was a man of great good sense; not the sort of man who would force
a child; indeed he averred that he abhorred precocity. But in truth
it was a time in England's history when such a child could easily be
overstimulated, when public events, the course of history, was so
exciting that every child of keen wit must have felt the effects.
The crowding of young minds did not end with the seventeenth
century. A striking example of the desire to press education is
found in the letters of Lord Chesterfield to his son, beginning in
1738, when the boy was not six years old. The language and subjects
would be deemed to-day suited only to mature minds. In 1741 the
father wrote:--
"This is the last letter I shall write to you as a little boy,
for to-morrow you will attain your ninth year; so that for the
future, I shall treat you as a youth. You must now commence a
different course of life, a different course of studies. No more
levity. Childish toys and playthings must be thrown aside, and
your mind directed to serious objects. What was not unbecoming
to a child would be disgraceful to a youth" etc.
Letter after letter continued in this tone. For years was the
process carried on. The result was a striking proof of the futility
of such methods. The son died when but little past his youth, a
failure in everything the father had most fondly desired and striven
for. The crowded brain ever stumbled and hesitated when put to any
important test.
It was inevitable that New England parents, with their fairly
passionate intensity of zeal for the education of their children,
should in many cases overstimulate and force the infant minds in
their charge. It seems somewhat anomalous with the almost universal
distrust and hindrance of female education that one of the most
precocious flowers of Puritanism should have been a girl, the "pious
and ingenious Mrs. Jane Turell," who was born in Boston in 1708.
Before her second year was finished she could speak distinctly, knew
her letters, and "could relate many stories out of the Scriptures
to the satisfaction and pleasure of the most judicious." Governor
Dudley and other "wise and polite" New England gentlemen were among
those entitled "judicious," who placed her on a table to show off
her acquirements. When she was three years old she could recite the
greater part of the _Assembly's Catechism_, many of the psalms, many
lines of poetry, and read distinctly; at the age of four she "asked
many astonishing questions about divine mysteries."
As her father was President of Harvard College, it may be inferred
she had an extended reading course; but in a catalogue of Harvard
College library printed a year or two later there is not a title
in it of any of the works of Addison, or any of the poems of Pope,
nothing of Dryden, Steele, Young, or Prior. In 1722, when Jane
Turell was twenty years old, the works of Shakespeare were first
advertised for sale in Boston.
[Illustration: The Copley Family]
In many families of extreme Puritanical thought, the children
developed at an early age a comprehension of religious matters
which would seem abnormal to-day, but was natural then. A striking
instance of this youthful development (as he was of highly sensitive
thought of every description) was Jonathan Edwards. A letter of his
written when he was twelve years old is certainly precocious in its
depth, though there is a certain hint of humor in it. Some one had
stated the belief that the soul was material and remained in the
body until after the resurrection. Young Edwards wrote:--
"I am informed y^t you have advanced a notion y^t the soul is
material and keeps w^th y^e body till y^e resurrection. As
I am a profest lover of novelty you must alow me to be much
entertained by this discovery. 1^st. I w^d know whether this
material soul keeps w^th in ye Coffin, and if so whether it
might not be convenient to build a repository for it in order
w^ch I w^d know w^t shape it is of whether round, triangular
or foresquare or whether it is a number of long fine strings
reaching from y^e head to y^e foot, and whether it does not
live a very discontented life. I am afraid when ye Coffin gives
way ye Earth will fall in and crush it, but if it should chuse
to live above Ground and hover above y^e Grave how big it is,
whether it covers all ye body, or is assined to y^e Head or
Breast, w^t it does when another Body is laid upon it. Souls are
not so big but y^t 10 or a dozen of y^m may be about one body
whether yy will not quarrill for y^e highest place."
His paper on spiders, written when he was but twelve, has become
famous as a bit of childish composition. It shows great habits of
observance, care in note-taking, and logical reasoning; and bears no
evidence of youth either in matter or manner.
A typical example of the spirit of the times in regard to juvenile
education is found in the letters of Mrs. Pinckney. She writes to a
friend:--
"Shall I give you the trouble my dear Madam to buy my son a new
toy (a description of which I inclose) to teach him according
to Mr. Locke's method (which I have carefully studied) to play
himself into learning. Mr. Pinckney (his father) himself has
been contriving a sett of toys to teach him his letters by the
time he can speak. You perceive we begin betimes for he is not
yet four months old."
This toy may have been what is known to-day as a set of alphabet
blocks, a commonplace toy. Locke speaks of a game of dice with
letters with which children could play a game like "royal-oak," and
through which they would learn to spell. He was not the inventor of
these "letter-dice," as is generally asserted. It was a stratagem of
Sir Hugh Plat, fully explained and illustrated in his _Jewel House
of Art and Nature_, printed in London in 1653, a portion of a page
of which is shown here.
The toy seems to have been a success, for the following year Mrs.
Pinckney writes to her sister:--
"Your little nephew not yet two and twenty months old prattles
very intelligibly: he gives his duty to you and thanks for the
toys, and desires me to tell his Aunt Polly that if she don't
take a care and a great deal of pains in her learning, he will
soon be the best scholar, for he can tell his letters in any
book without hesitation, and begins to spell before he is two
years old."
This precocious infant, afterward General Charles Cotesworth
Pinckney of Revolutionary fame, declared in his later life that this
early teaching was sad stuff, and that the haste to make him a very
clever fellow nearly made him a very stupid one.
[Illustration:
_A ready way for children to learn their A.B.C._
Cau[f.]e 4 large dice of bone or wood to be made, and upon every
[f.]quare, one of the [f.]mal letters of the cro[f.]s row to be
graven, but in [f.]ome bigger [f.]hape, and the child u[f.]ing to
play much with them, and being alwayes told what letter chanceth,
will [f.]oon gain his Alphabet, as it were by the way of [f.]port or
pa[f.]time. I have heard of a pair of cards, whereon mo[f.]t of the
principall Grammer rules have been printed, and the School-Ma[f.]ter
hath found good [f.]port thereat with his [f.]chollers.
Facsimile from _Jewel House of Art and Nature_]
Little Martha Laurens, born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1759,
could, in her third year, "read any book"; and like many another
child since her day learned to read holding the book upside down.
Joseph T. Buckingham declared that when he was four years old he
knew by heart nearly all the reading lessons in the primer and much
of the _Westminster Catechism_.
Boys entered the Boston Latin School when as young as but six years
and a half old. They began to study Latin frequently when much
younger. Zealous and injudicious parents sometimes taught infants
but three years old to read Latin words as soon as they could
English ones. It redounds to the credit of the scholarship of one
of my kinsmen, rather than to his good sense or good temper (albeit
he was a minister of the Gospel) that each morning while he shaved,
his little son, five years of age, stood by his dressing-table,
on a footstool, and read Latin to his father, who had also a copy
of the same book open before him, that he might note and correct
the child's errors. And the child when grown to old age told his
children and grandchildren that his father, angered at what he
deemed slowness of progress, frequent errors of pronunciation, and
poor attempts at translation, would throw the book at the child, and
once felled him from the footstool to the floor.
[Illustration: Polly Flagg, One Year Old, 1751]
It is told of Timothy Dwight, President of Yale College, that he
learned the alphabet at a single lesson, and could read the Bible
before he was four years old, and taught it to his comrades. At
the age of six he was sent to the grammar school and importuned his
father to let him study Latin. Being denied he studied through the
Latin grammar twice without a teacher, borrowing a book of an older
boy. He would have been prepared for college when but eight years
old, had not the grammar school luckily discontinued and left him
without a teacher.
The curriculum at Harvard in olden times bore little resemblance
to that of to-day. Sciences were unknown, and the requirements in
mathematics were meagre. Still a boy needed even then to be clever
to know enough Greek and Latin to enter at eleven. Paul Dudley did
so in 1686. His father wrote to the president a quaint letter of
introduction:--
"I have humbly to offer you a little, sober, and well-disposed
son, who, tho' very young, if he may have the favour of
admittance, I hope his learning may be tollerable: and for him
I will promise that by your care and my care, his own Industry,
and the blessing of God, this mother the University shall not be
ashamed to allow him the place of a son--Appoint a time when he
may be examined."
There were still younger college students. In 1799 there was
graduated from Rhode Island College (now Brown University) a boy
named John Pitman, who was barely fourteen.
There is no evidence that the early marriages, that is, marriages
of children and very young lads and girls, which were far from rare
in England during the first years of our colonial life, ever were
permitted in the new world. Nor were they as common at that date in
England as during the previous century, for there had been severe
legislation against them, especially against the youthful marriages
of poor folk.
Many have known of the juvenile weddings of English princes and
princesses and marriages by proxy for reasons of state; but few know
of these unions being general among English people. An interesting
and authoritative book on this subject was published in 1897 by the
_Early English Text Society_. Dr. Furnivall made a careful study of
the old court records of the town of Chester, England, and published
this account of trials and law cases concerning child-marriages,
divorces, ratifications, troth-plights, affiliations, clandestine
marriages, and other kindred matters. It is, as the editor says, a
"most light-giving" volume. It ranges over all classes, from people
of wealth, the manor owners and squires, to ale-house keepers,
farmers, cobblers, maids, and men. It tells of the marriages of
little children in their nurses' arms, some but two or three years
old, so young that their baby tongues could not speak the words
of matrimony. Various arrangements, chiefly relating to lands and
maintenance, led to these marriages, also a desire to evade the
Crown's guardianship of orphans. In one case, a "bigge damsell" of
twelve "intysed with two apples" a younger boy to marry her. "The
woman tempted me and I did eat." One little bridegroom of three
was held up in the arms of an English clergyman, who coaxed him to
repeat the words of the service. Before it was finished the child
said he would learn no more of his lesson that day. The parson
answered, "You must speak a little more and then go play yon." The
child-marriage of the Earl and Countess of Essex in 1606, resulting
in the poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury, and the Countess' marriage
to the Earl of Somerset, is a well-known historical example of the
unhappy result of such marriages. The Earl of Anglesey's grandson
was married in 1673, when he was eight years old. Mary Hewitt of
Danton Basset was wedded in 1669, when three years old. In 1672
John Evelyn was present "at the marriage of Lord Arlington's only
daughter, a sweet child if there ever was any, aged five, to the
Duke of Grafton."
I have given the dates of these later child-marriages to show that
they were not unusual in England long after America was settled. As
late as 1729 a little English girl of some wealth and but nine years
old was taken from her boarding school by her guardian and married
to his son. Very differently did the upright New Englander regard
the duties of guardianship. A little girl named Rebecca Cooper was
left an orphan in early colonial days at Salem, Massachusetts. She
was "a verie good match," an "inheritrice," and the sharp eyes of
Emanuel Downing and his wife were upon her to "make a motion of
marriage" for their son. Both wrote to Governor Winthrop, Madam
Downing's brother, to gain his intercession in the matter, though
the maid had not been spoken to. Madam wrote:--
"The disposition of the mayde and her education with Mrs.
Endicott are hopefull, her person tollerable, the estate very
convenient, and that is the state of the business."
Governor Endicott was the guardian and his answering letter to
Winthrop has a manly and honorable ring which might well have
sounded in the ears of all English guardians.
[Illustration: James Flagg, Five Years Old, 1744]
"I am told you are sollicited in a busniss concerninge the girle
which was putt to my warde and trust. I have not been made
acquainted with it by you know whome, which, if there had been
any such intendment, I think had been but reason. But to let
that passe, I pray you advise not to stirre in it, for it will
not be affected for reasons I shall show you....
"The Lord knows I have alwais resolved (and so hath my wife ever
since the girl came to vs) to yielde her vp to be disposed by
yourself to any of yours if ever the Lord should make her fitt
and worthie.
"Now for the other for whom you writt. I confesse I cannot
freelie yeald thereunto for the present, for these grounds.
ffirst: The girle desires not to mary as yet. 2ndlee: Shee
confesseth (which is the truth) hereselfe to be altogether yett
vnfitt for such a condition, shee beinge a verie girl and but
15 yeares of age. 3rdlie: Where the man was moved to her shee
said shee could not like him. 4thlie: You know it would be of
ill reporte that a girl because shee hath some estate should
bee disposed of soe young, espetialie not having any parents to
choose for her. ffifthlie: I have some good hopes of the child's
coming on to the best thinges. And on the other side I fear--I
will say no more. Other things I shall tell you when we meet.
If this will not satisfy some, let the Court take her from mee
and place with any other to dispose of her. I shall be content.
Which I heare was plotted to accomplish this end; but I will
further enquire about it, and you shall know if it be true, ffor
I know there are many passages about this busniss which when you
heare of you will not like."
It is pleasant to record that all this match-making and machination
came to naught. It would not have been strange if Governor Winthrop
had deemed this girl old enough to be married. He had been but
seventeen years old himself when he was married, but he was, so he
writes, "a man in stature and understanding." He evidently was of
the opinion that a child of fourteen or fifteen was of mature years.
When his son John was but fourteen the governor made a will making
the boy the executor of it.
These child-marriages were not abolished in America because maturity
or majority was established at a greater age; for up to the
Revolution boys reached man's estate at sixteen years of age, became
tax-payers, and served in the militia. Early unions were controlled
by restrictive laws, such as the one enacted in Massachusetts in
1646, that no female orphan during her minority should be given in
marriage by any one except with the approbation of the majority of
the selectmen of the town in which she resided. Another privilege
of the girl orphan was that at fourteen she could choose her own
guardian. Thus were children protected in the new world, and their
rights conserved.