After Homer, the child _motif_ in literature is less in evidence. Drama, of its nature, has little place for the child except to put a keener poignancy in tragedy. So Sophocles used the children of Œdipus. So in his time did Shakespeare with the princes of _Richard III_, with Marcellus in _Coriolanus_, with Macduff’s sprightly lad, and with others. Theocritus has a child to furnish an aside for the gossipy Syracusan dames. Anacreon introduces the counterfeit of childhood in the Cupids, whose sophisticated conventionality checked invention in Elizabethan lyrics as it did in art from Pompeii to Rubens and later. Cupids are symbols, children of the brain, not of the heart, and figure in song and painting as signs. They have a message for the mind; they do not touch the feelings, while on the other hand, they free the artist from seeking in life the expressive significance that Homer gave the child. Literature had to wait long for the naturalness of Homer to reappear. Virgil has a little of it in Ascanius, another Cupid, and it is significant that Virgil’s one outstanding natural touch is found in the famous Messianic eclogue: _Incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem._ As for other Latins, whether it be bachelorship or the erotic preoccupation of the lyricists, or the supreme power of the father in Roman customs and law, Latin literature does not mirror for us prominently the child and mother nor reflect their natural attractiveness as found in Homer. Well, even Greece seems to have lost the art, and a new inspiration was needed. That inspiration came with the Divine Child of Bethlehem. XVII THE CHRIST-CHILD TEST OF LITERATURE The influence of the Christ-Child on painting was tremendous and lasting. A history of Christian art could be written around the Madonna, and the subject has attracted the notice of many writers, indexed in art libraries. Alice Meynell has treated the subject attractively and with her studious insight in the _Children of the Old Masters_. In the Catacombs, Christian art felt and portrayed the Divine Child and His Mother. Byzantine ornamentation and mosaics gave the Child a rigid majesty which veiled His winsomeness, but the master painters came closer to childhood and brought Madonnas from the walls of crypts and of cathedrals to the devotional shrine and the chapel, making the Child less architectural and more natural.