Childhood in Greek and Roman Literature

THERE was a time, just beyond the memory of men now living, when the Child was born in literature. At the same period books for children began to be written. There were children, indeed, in literature before Wordsworth created Alice Fell and Lucy Gray, or breathed the lines beginning,

and there were books for the young before Mr. Day wrote Sandford and Merton ; especially is it to be noted that Goldsmith, who was an avant-courier of Wordsworth, had a very delightful perception of the child, and amused himself with him in the Vicar of Wakefield, while lie or his double entertained his little friends in real life with the Renowned History of Goody Two Shoes. Nevertheless, there has been, since the day of Wordsworth, such a succession of childish figures in prose and verse that we are justified in believing childhood to have been discovered at the close of the last century. The child has now become so common that we scarcely consider how absent he is from the earlier literature. Men and women are there, lovers, maidens, and youth, but these are all with us still. The child as been added to the dramatis personœ of modern literature.

There is a correlation between childhood in literature and a literature for children, but it will best be understood when one has considered the meaning of the appearance and disappearance of the child in different epochs of literature and art; for while a hasty survey certainly assures one that the nineteenth century regards childhood far more intently than any previous age, it is impossible that so elemental a figure as the child should ever have been wholly lost to sight. A comparison of literatures with reference to this figure may disclose some of the fundamental differences which exist between this century and those which have preceded it; it may also disclose a still deeper note of unity, struck by the essential spirit in childhood itself. It is not worth while in such a study to have much recourse to the minor masters; if a theme so elemental and so universal in its relations is not to be illustrated from the great creative expositors of human nature, it cannot have the importance which we claim for it.

I.

When Dr. Schliemann with his little shovel uncovered the treasures of Mycenæ and Ilium, a good many timid souls rejoiced exceedingly over a convincing proof of the authenticity of the Homeric legends. There always will be those who find the proof of a spiritual fact in some corresponding material fact; who wish to see the bones of Agamemnon before they are quite ready to believe in the Agamemnon of the Iliad ; to whom the Bible is not true until its truth has been confirmed by some external witness. But when science has done its utmost, there still remains in a work of art a certain testimony to truth, which may be illustrated by science, but cannot be superseded by it. Agamemnon has lived all these years in the belief of men without the aid of any cups, or saucers, or golden vessels, or even bones. Literature, and especially imaginative literature, is the exponent of the life of a people, and we must still go to it for our most intimate knowledge. No careful antiquarian research can reproduce for us the women of early Greece as Homer has set them before us in a few lines in his pictures of Helen and Penelope and Nausikaä. When, therefore, we ask ourselves of childhood in Greek life, we may reconstruct it out of the multitudinous references in Greek literature to the education of children, to their sports and games; and it is no very difficult task to follow the child from birth through the nursery to the time when it assumes its place in the active community : but the main inquiries must still be, What pictures have we of childhood ? What part does the child play in that drama which is set before us in a microcosm by poets and tragedians?

The actions of Homer’s heroes are spiritualized by reflection. That is, as the tree which meets the eye becomes a spiritual tree when one sees its answering image in the pool which it overhangs, so those likenesses which Homer sets over against the deeds of his heroes release the souls of the deeds, and give them wings for a flight in the imagination. A crowd of men flock to the assembly : seen in the bright reflection of Homer’s imagination, they are a swarm of bees:—

So Chapman, in his Gothic fashion, running up his little spires and pinnacles upon the building which he has raised from Homer’s material ; but the idea is all Homer’s, and Chapman’s “ repairing the degrees of their egression endlessly,” with its resonant hum, is hardly more intentionally a reflex of sound and motion than Homer’s αìϵì υϵου ερομϵáωυ

We look again at Chapman’s way of rendering the caressing little passage in the fourth book of the Iliad, where Homer, wishing to speak of the ease and tenderness with which Athene turns aside the arrow shot at Menelaos, calls up the image of a mother brushing a fly from the face of her sleeping child: —

Here the Englishman has caught the notion of ease, and emphasized that; yet he has missed the tenderness, and all because he was not content to accept the simple image, but must needs refract it into " assaults of rude aud busy flies.” Better is the rendering of the picturesque figure in which Ajax, beset by the Trojans, is likened to an ass belabored by a pack of boys : —

Apollo, sweeping away the rampart of the Greeks, does it as easily as a boy, who has heaped a pile of sand upon the sea-shore in childish sport, in sport razes it with feet and hands. Achilles half pities, half chides, the imploring, weeping Patroclos, when he says, —

Chapman’s “ hangs on her ” is hardly so particular as Homer’s ϵιαυου απτομϵυη, plucks at her gown ; and he has quite missed the picture offered by the poet, who makes the child, as soon as she discovers her mother, beg to be taken up, and insistently stop her as she goes by on some errand. Here again the naive domestic scene in Homer is charged in Chapman with a certain half-tragic meaning.

This, we think, completes the short catalogue of Homer’s indirect reference to childhood, and the comparison with the Elizabethan poet’s use of the same forms brings out more distinctly the sweet simplicity and native dignity of the Greek. When childhood is thus referred to by Homer, it is used with no condescension, and with no thought of investing it with any adventitious property. It is a part of nature, as the bees are a part of nature; and when Achilles likens his friend in his tears to a little girl wishing to be taken up by her mother, he is not taunting him with being a “cry-baby.”

Leaving the indirect references, one recalls immediately the single picture of childhood which stands among the heroic scenes of the Iliad. When Hector has his memorable parting with Andromache, as related in the sixth book of the Iliad, the child Astyanax is present in the nurse’s arms. Here Chapman is so careless that we desert him, and fall back on a simple rendering into prose of the passage relating to the child : —

“ With this, famous Hector reached forth to take his boy, but back into the bosom of his fair-girded nurse the hoy shrank with a cry, frightened at the sight of his dear father; for he was afraid of the brass, — yes, and of the plume made of a horse’s mane, when he saw it nodding dreadfully at the helmet’s peak. Then out laughed his dear father and his noble mother. Quick from his head famous Hector took the helmet and laid it on the ground, where it shone. Then he kissed his dear son and tossed him in the air, and thus he prayed to Zeus and all the gods. . . . These were his words, and so he placed the boy, his boy, in the hands of his dear wife; and she received him into her odorous bosom, smiling through her tears. Her husband had compassion on her when he saw it, and stroked her with his hand, spoke to her, and called her by her name.” ⁴

Like so many other passages in Homer, this at once offers themes for sculpture. Flaxman was right when he presented his series of illustrations to the Iliad and Odyssey in outline, and gave a statuesque character to the groups, though his interpretation of this special scene is commonplace. There is an elemental property about the life exhibited in Homer which the firm boundaries of sculpture most fitly inclose. Thus childhood, in this passage, is characterized by an entirely simple emotion,— the sudden fear of an infant at the sight of his father’s shining helmet and frowning plume; while the relation of maturity to childhood is presented in the strong man’s concession to weakness, as he laughs and lays aside his helmet, and then catches and tosses the child.

It is somewhat perilous to comment upon Homer. The appeal in his poetry is so direct to universal feeling, and so free from the entanglements of a too refined sensibility, that the moment one begins to enlarge upon the sentiment in his epic one is in danger of importing into it subtleties which would have been incomprehensible to Homer. There is preserved, especially in the Iliad, the picture of a society which is physically developed, but intellectually unrefined. The men weep like children when they cannot have what they want, and the passions which stir life are those which lie nearest the physical forms of expression. When we come thus upon this picture of Hector’s parting with Andromache, we are impressed chiefly with the fact that it is human life in outline. Here are great facts of human experience, and they are so told that not one of them requires a word of explanation to make it intelligible to a child. The child, we are reminded in a later philosophy, is father of the man, and Astyanax is a miniature Hector; for we have only to go forward a few pages to find Hector, when brought face to face with Ajax, confessing to a terrible thumping of fear in his breast.

There is one figure in early Greek domestic life which has frequent recognition in literature. It helps in our study of this subject to find the nurse so conspicuous ; in the passage last quoted she is given an epithet which is reserved for goddesses and noble women. The definite regard paid to one so identified with childhood is in accord with the open acceptance of the physical aspect of human nature which is at the basis of the Homeric poems. The frankness with which the elemental conditions of life are made to serve the poet’s purpose, so that eating and drinking, sleeping and fighting, weeping and laughing, running and dancing, are familiar incidents of the poem, finds a place for the nurse and the house-dog. Few incidents in the Odyssey are better remembered by its readers than the recognition of the travelworn Odysseus by the old watch-dog, and by the nurse who washes the hero’s feet and discovers the scar of the wound made by the boar’s tusk when the man before her was a youth.

The child, in the Homeric conception, was a little human creature uninvested with any mystery, a part of that society which had itself scarcely passed beyond the bounds of childhood. As the horizon which limited early Greece was a narrow one, and the world in which the heroes moved was surrounded by a vast terra incognita, so human life, in its Homeric acceptance, was one of simple forms ; that which lay beyond tangible and visible experience was rarely visited, and was peopled with shapes which brought a childish fright. There was, in a word, nothing in the development of man’s nature, as recorded by Homer, which would make him look with questioning toward his child. He regarded the world about him with scarcely more mature thought than did the child whom he tossed in the air, and until life should be apprehended in its more complex relations, he was not likely to see in his child anything more than an epitome of his own little round. The contrast between childhood and manhood was too faint to serve much of a purpose in art.

The difference between Homer and the tragedians is at once perceived to be the difference between a boy’s thought and a man’s thought. The colonial growth, the Persian war, the political development, the commerce with other peoples, were witnesses to a more complex life and the quick causes of a profounder apprehension of human existence. It happens that we have in the Œdipus Tyrannus of Sophocles an incident which offers a suggestive comparison with the simple picture of the parting of Hector and Andromache. In the earlier poem, the hero, expecting the fortunes of war, disdains all suggestions of prudence, and speaks as a brave man must, who sets honor above ease, and counts the cost of sacrifice only to stir himself to greater courage and resolution. He asks that his child may take his place in time, and he dries his wife’s tears with the simple words that no man can separate him from her, that fate alone can intervene; in Chapman’s nervous rendering: —

Here, the impending disaster to Troy, with the inclusion of Hector’s fortune, appears as one fact out of many, an incident in life, bringing other incidents in its train, yet scarcely more ethical in its relations than if it followed from the throw of dice. In the Œdipus, when the king, overwhelmed by his fate, in the supreme hour of his anguish takes vengeance upon his eyes, there follows a passage of surpassing pathos. To the mad violence has succeeded a moment of tender grief, and the unhappy Œdipus stretches out his arms for his children, that he may bid them farewell. His own terrible fate is dimmed in his thought by the suffering which the inevitable curse of the house is to bring into their lives. He reflects; he dismisses his sons, — they, at least, can fight their battles in the world; he turns to his defenseless little daughters, and pours out for them the tears of a stricken father. The not-to-be-questioned fate of Homer, an inexplicable incident of life, which men must set aside from calculation and thought because it is inexplicable, has become in Sophocles a terrible mystery, connecting itself with man’s conduct, even when that is unwittingly in violation of divine decree, and following him with such unrelenting vigilance that death cannot be counted the end of perilous life. The child, in the supreme moment of Hector’s destiny, is to him the restoration of order, the replacement of his loss; the children, in the supreme moment of the destiny of Œdipus, are to him only the means of prolonging and rendering more murky the darkness which has fallen upon him. When Hector looks upon Astyanax, he sees the world rolling on, sunlight chasing shadow, repeating the life he has known ; when Œdipus looks upon Antigone and Ismene, he sees new disclosures of the possibilities of a dread power under which the world is abiding.

It cannot have escaped notice how large a part is played by children in the spectacular appointments of the Greek drama. Those symbolic processions, those groups of human life, those scenes of human passion, are rendered more complete by the silent presence of children. They serve in the temples ; their eyes are quick to catch the coming of the messenger; they suffer dumbly in the fate that pulls down royal houses and topples the pillars of ancestral palaces. It was impossible that it should be otherwise. The Greek mind, which found expression in tragic art, was oppressed by the problems not so much of individual fate as of the subtle relations of human life. The serpents winding about Laokoön entwined in their folds the shrinking youths, and the father’s anguish was for the destiny which would not let him suffer alone. Yet there is scarcely a child’s voice to be heard in the whole range of Greek poetic art. The conception is universally of the child not as acting, far less as speaking, but as a passive member of the social order. It is not its individual life so much as its related life which is contemplated.

We are related to the Greeks not only through the higher forms of literature, but through the political thought which had with them both historical development and speculative representation. It comes thus within the range of our inquiry to ask what recognition of childhood there was in writings which sought to give an artistic form to political thought. There is a frequent recurrence by Plato to the subject of childhood in the state, and we may see in his presentation not only the germinal relation which childhood bears, so that education becomes necessarily one of the significant functions of government, but also what may not unfairly be called a reflection of divinity.

The education which in the ideal state is to be given to children is represented by him, indeed, as the evolution from the sensations of pleasure and pain to the perception of virtue and vice. “Pleasure and pain,” he says,⁵ “ I maintain to be the first perceptions of children, and I say that they are the forms under which virtue and vice are originally present to them. As to wisdom and true and fixed opinions, happy is the man who acquires them, even when declining in years ; and he who possesses them, and the blessings which are contained in them, is a perfect man. Now I mean by education that training which is given by suitable habits to the first instincts of virtue in children; when pleasure and friendship and pain and hatred are rightly implanted in souls not yet capable of understanding the nature of them, and who find them, after they have attained reason, to be in harmony with her. This harmony of the soul, when perfected, is virtue ; but the particular training in respect of pleasure and pain which leads you always to hate what you ought to hate, and love what you ought to love, from the beginning to the end, may be separated off, and, in my view, will be rightly called education.”

In the Republic, Plato theorizes at great length upon a possible selection and training of children, which rests for its basis upon a too pronounced physical assumption, so that one in reading certain passages might easily fancy that he was considering the production of a superior breed of colts, and that the soul was the product of material forces only; but the fifth book, which contains these audacious speculations, may fairly be taken in the spirit in which Proudhon is said to have thrown out some of his extravagant assertions,— he expected to be beaten down in his price.

There are other passages, especially in the Laws, in reading which one is struck by a certain reverence for childhood, as that interesting one where caution is given against disturbing the uniformity of children’s plays on account of their connection with the life of the state. The modern theories of the Kindergarten find a notable support in Plato’s reasoning: “ I say that in states generally no one has observed that the plays of childhood have a great deal to do with the permanence or want of permanence in legislation. For when plays are ordered with a view to children having the same plays and amusing themselves after the same manner and finding delight in the same playthings, the more solemn institutions of the state are allowed to remain undisturbed. Whereas, if sports are disturbed and innovations are made in them, and they constantly change, and the young never speak of their having the same likings or the same established notions of good and bad taste, either in the bearing of their bodies or in their dress, but he who devises something new and out of the way in figures and colors and the like is held in special honor, we may truly say that no greater evil can happen in a state ; for he who changes the sports is secretly changing the manners of the young, and making the old to be dishonored among them, and the new to be honored. And I affirm that there is nothing which is a greater injury to all states than saying or thinking thus.” ⁶

It is, however, most germane to our purpose to cite a striking passage from the Laws, in which Plato most distinctly recognizes the power resident in childhood to assimilate the purest expression of truth. The Athenian, in the dialogue, is speaking, and says, “ The next suggestion which I have to offer is that all our three choruses [that is, choruses representing the three epochs of life] shall sing to the young and tender souls of children, reciting in their strains all the noble thoughts of which we have already spoken, or are about to speak ; and the sum of them shall be that the life which is by the gods deemed to be the happiest is the holiest, and we shall affirm this to be a most certain truth ; and the minds of our young disciples will be more likely to receive these words of ours than any others which we might address to them. . . .

“ First will enter, in their natural order, the sacred choir, composed of children, which is to sing lustily the heaventaught lay to the whole city. Next will follow the chorus of young men under the age of thirty, who will call upon the God Pæan to testify to the truth of their words, and will pray to him to be gracious to the youth and to turn their hearts. Thirdly, the choir of elder men, who are from thirty to sixty years of age, will also sing. There remain those who are too old to sing, and they will tell stories illustrating the same virtues, as with the voice of an oracle.”⁷

Plato used human society as material from which to construct an organization artistically perfect and representing political order, just as Phidias or Praxiteles used clay as a material from which to construct the human being artistically perfect and representing the soul of man. Into this fine organism of the ideal state Plato incorporated his conception of childhood in its two relations of singing and being sung to. He thought of the child as a member of the threefold chorus of life, and when he set these choirs hymning the divine strain, he made the recipients of the revelation to be themselves children, the forming elements of the growing, organic state. It is certainly a wide arc which is spanned by these three great representatives of Greek art, and in passing from Homer to Sophocles, and from Sophocles to Plato, we are not merely considering the epic, the tragic, and the philosophic treatment of childhood in literature; we are discovering the development of the conception of childhood in a nation which has communicated to history the eidolon of the fairest humanity. It is scarcely too much to speak of it as the evolution of a soul, and to find, as one so often finds in his study of Greece, the outline of the course of the world’s thought.

The old, formal view of antiquity, which once placed Grecian life almost beyond the pale of our human sympathy, and made the men and women cold marble figures in our imagination, has given place to a warmer regard. Through literary reproduction, which paraphrases Greek life in the dramatic art of Browning and Fitzgerald, gives us Spencerian versions of Homer, or, better still, the healthy childlike recital in Mr. Palmer’s version of the Odyssey, and enables us to sit down after dinner with Plato, Mr. Jowett being an idiomatic interpreter ; through the discoveries of Schliemann and others, by which the mythic and heroic ages of Greece are made almost grotesquely familiar, we are coming to read Grecian history, in Niebuhr’s felicitous phrase, as if it really happened, and to lay aside our artificial and distant ways of becoming familiar with Greek life. Yet the means which have led to this modern attitude toward classic antiquity are themselves the product of modern life ; the secrets of Greek life are more open to us now because our own life has become freer, more hospitable, and more catholic. It is a delight to us to turn from the marble of Phidias to the terra cotta of the unknown modelers of the Tanagra figurines, while these homelike, domestic images serve as interpreters, also, of the larger, nobler designs. So we have recourse to those fragments of the Greek Anthology which give us glimpses of Greek interiors, and by means of them we find a side-light thrown upon the more majestic expressions of poetic and dramatic art.

The Anthology gathers for us the epigrams, epitaphs, proverbs, fables, and little odds and ends which have been saved from the ruins of literature, and in turning its leaves one is impressed by the large number of references to childhood. It is as when, rambling through the streets of the uncovered Pompeii, one comes upon the playthings of children, dead nigh two thousand years. Here are tender memorials of lost babes in inscriptions upon forgotten tombs, and laments of fathers and mothers for the darkness which has come upon their dwellings. We seem to hear the prattle of infancy and the mother’s lullaby. The Greeks, as we, covered their loss with an instinctive trust in some better fortune in store for the child, and hushed their skepticism with the song of hope and the remembrance of stories which they had come in colder hours to disbelieve, Here, for example, is an anonymous elegy : —

Thou hast not, O ruler Pluto, with pious intent, stolen for thy underground world a girl of five years, admired by all. For thou hast cut, as it were, from the root, a sweet-scented rose in the season of a commencing spring, before it had completed its proper time. But come, Alexander and Philtatus ; do not any longer weep and pour forth lamentations for the regretted girl. For she had, yes, she had a rosy face which meant that she should remain in the immortal dwellings of the sky. Trust, then, to stories of old. For it was not Death but the Naiads, who stole the good girl as once they stole Hylas.⁸

Perhaps the most celebrated of these tender domestic passages is to be found in the oft-quoted lines from Simonides, where Dauaë sings over the boy Perseus : —

II.

As before we stopped in front of the charming group which Homer gives us in the parting of Hector and Andromache, with the child Astyanax set in the midst, so in taking the poet who occupies the chief place in Latin literature we find a significant contrast. The picture of Æneas bearing upon his shoulders the aged Anchises and leading by the hand the young Ascanius is a distinct Roman picture. The two poems move through somewhat parallel cycles, and have adventures which are common to both ; but the figure of Odysseus is essentially a single figure, and his wanderings may easily be taken to typify tbe excursions of the human soul. Æneas, on the other hand, seems always the centre of a family group, and his journeyings always appear to be movements toward a final city and nation. The Greek idea of individuality and the Roman of relationship have signal illustration in these poems. Throughout the Æneid the figure of Ascanius is an important one. There is a nice disclosure of growth in personality, and one is aware that the grandson is coming forward into his place as a member of the family, to be thereafter representative. The poet never loses sight of the boy’s future. Homer, in his shield of Achilles, that microcosm of human life, forgets to make room for children. Virgil, in his prophetic shield, shows the long triumphs from Ascanius down, and casts a light upon the cave wherein the twin boys were suckled by the wolf. One of the most interesting episodes in the Æneid is the childhood of Camilla, in which the warrior maid’s nature is 1 D’Arcy W. Thompson, in his Ancient Leaves. carried back and reproduced in diminutive form. The evolutions of the boys in the fifth book, while full of boyish life, come rather under the form of mimic soldiery than of spontaneous youth.

Childhood, in Roman literature, is not contemplated as a fine revelation of nature. In the grosser conception, children are reckoned as scarcely more than cubs; but in the strong hold which the family idea had upon the Roman mind it was impossible that in the refinement which came gradually upon life childhood should not play a part of its own in poetry, and come to represent the more spiritual side of the family life. Thus Catullus, in one of his nuptial odes, has a charming picture of infancy awaking into consciousness and affection : —

So also the same poet has a tender elegy upon the death of his little girl’s sparrow, which is really the poet’s interpretation of his child’s sorrow. The elegy has been rendered into Scottish, in a paraphrase which scarcely imports anything into the simple pathos of the original : —

THE DEAD CANARY.

The epitaphs and the elegies of the Greek Anthology have their counterpart in Latin. Mr. Thompson, who rendered Catullus’s Funus Passeris so daintily, has tried his hand at a passage from Statius: ¹² —

ON THE DEATH OF A CHILD.

In the literature which sounds the deeper waters of life, we find references to childhood ; but the child rarely, if ever, draws the thought outside of the confines of this world. As near an approach as any to a perception of the mystery of childhood is in a passage in Lucretius, where the poet looks down with compassion upon the new-born infant as one of the mysteries of nature: “ Moreover, the babe, like a sailor cast ashore by the cruel waves, lies naked on the ground, speechless, in need of every aid to life when first nature lias cast him forth by great throes from his mother’s womb, and he fills the air with his piteous wail, as befits one whose doom it is to pass through so much misery in life.” ¹³ Lucretius displayed a profound reverence for human affection, Scattered through his great poem are fine lines in which childhood appears. “ Soon,” he says, in one mournful passage,— "soon shall thy home receive thee no more with glad welcome, nor thy dear ehildren run to snatch thy first kiss, touching thy heart with silent gladness.” ¹⁴

Any survey of ancient Greek and Roman life would be incomplete which left out of view the supernatural element. We need not inquire whether there was a conscious materialization of spiritual forces, or an idealization of physical phenomena. We have simply to do with certain shapes and figures which dwelt in the mind and formed a part of its furniture ; coming and going like shadows, yet like shadows confessing a forming substance ; embodying belief and symbolizing moods. In that overarching and surrounding world, peopled by the countless personages of Greek and Roman supernaturalism, we may discover, if we will, a vague, distorted, yet sometimes transcendent reflection of the life which men and women were living upon the more palpable and tangible earth.

What, then, has the childhood of the gods to tell us ? We have the playful incident of Hermes, or Mercurius, getting out of his cradle to steal the oxen of Admetos, and the similar one of Herakles strangling the snakes that attacked him just after his birth; but these are simply stories intended to carry back into childhood the cunning of the one and the strength of the other. It is more to our purpose to note the presence in the pantheon of the child who remains always a child, and is known to us familiarly as Eros, or Cupid, or Amor. It is true that the myth includes the union of Cupid and Psyche; nevertheless, the prevailing conception is of a boy, winged, armed with bow and arrows, the son and messenger of Venus. It may be said that the myth gradually adapted itself to this form, which is not especially apparent in the earlier stories. The figure of Love, as thus presented, has been more completely adopted into modern poetry than any other in the old mythology, and it cannot be said that its characteristics have been materially altered. It is doubtful whether the ancient idea was more simple than the same when reproduced in Thorwaldsen’s sculpture, or in Ben Jonson’s Venus’ Runaway. The central conception is essentially an unmoral one; it knows not right or wrong, good or evil ; the mischief-making is capricious, and not malicious. There is the idea only of delight, of an innocence which is untutored, of a will which is the wind’s will. It would seem as if, in fastening upon childhood as the embodiment of love, the ancients, as well as their modern heirs, were bent upon ridding life of conscience and fate, — upon making love to have neither memory nor foresight, but only the joy of the moment. This sporting child was a refuge, in their minds, from the ills of life, a residence of the one central joy of the world. There is an infinite pathos in the erection of childhood into a temple for the worship of Love. There was, indeed, in the reception of this myth a wide range from purity to grossness, as the word love itself has to do service along an arc which subtends heaven and hell ; but when we distill the poetry and art which gather about the myth of Cupid, the essence will he found in this conception of love as a child, — a conception never wholly lost, even when the child was robbed of the purity which we recognize as its ideal property. It should be noted, also, that the Romans laid hold of this idea more eagerly than did the Greeks; for the child itself, though more artistically set forth in Greek literature, appears as a more vital force in Roman literature.

H. E. Scudder.