The distinction is worth bearing in mind when one surveys English literature with the purpose of recognizing the child in it. There are certain elemental facts and truths of which old and new cannot be predicated. The vision of helpless childhood is no modern discovery; it is no ancient revelation. The child at play was seen by Homer and by Cowper, and the latter did not derive his apprehension from any study of the former. The humanism which underlies all literature is independent of circumstances for its perception of the great moving forces of life; it is independent of the great changes in human history; even so great a change as the advent of Christianity could not interfere with the normal expression of elemental facts in life. Wherein, then, lies the difference between an antique and a modern apprehension of childhood? For what may one look in a survey of English literature that he would not find in Greek or Roman authors? Is there any development of human thought in relation to childhood to be traced in a literature which has reflected the mind of the centuries since the Renaissance? The most aggressive type of modern Christianity, at any rate the most free type, is to be found amongst English-speaking people; and if Christianity has in any way modified the course of thought regarding the child, the effect will certainly be seen in English literature and art. * * * * * A recollection of ballad literature, without critical inquiry of the comparative age of the writings, brings to light the familiar and frequent incident of cruelty to children in some form: of the secret putting away of babes, as in the affecting ballad of the Queen’s Marie; of the cold and heartless murder, as in the Cruel Mother, and in the tragic tale of The Child’s Last Will, where a sudden dramatic and revealing turn is given, after the child has willed its various possessions, in the lines,— “‘What wish leav’st thou thy step-mother Little daughter dear?’ ‘Of hell the bitter sorrow Sweet step-mother mine For ah, all! I am so ill, ah!’ “‘What wish leav’st thou thy old nurse Little daughter dear?’ ‘For her I wish the same pangs Sweet step-mother mine For ah, ah! I am so ill, ah!’” That grewsome story of Lamkin, with its dripping of blood in almost every stanza, gets half its curdling power from the slow torture of the sensibilities, as the babe is slain and then rocked in its cradle, and the mother, summoned by its cries, meets her own fate at the hands of the treacherous nurse and Lamkin, whose name is a piece of bald irony:— “Then Lamkin’s ta’en a sharp knife That hang down by his gaire, And he has gi’en the bonny babe A deep wound and a sair. “Then Lamkin he rocked, And the fause nourice sang Till frae ilkae bore o’ the cradle The red blood out sprang. “Then out it spak the ladie As she stood on the stair, ‘What ails my bairn, nourice, That he’s greeting sae sair?