“_Val._ O’ my word, the father’s son: I’ll swear, ’tis a very pretty boy. O’ my troth, I looked upon him o’ Wednesday half an hour together: has such a confirmed countenance. I saw him run after a gilded butterfly; and when he caught it, he let it go again; and after it again: and over and over he comes, and up again; catched it again; or whether his fall enraged him, or how ’twas, he did so set his teeth and tear it; O, I warrant, how he mammocked it! “_Vol._ One on ’s father’s moods. “_Val._ Indeed, la, ’tis a noble child. “_Vir._ A crack, madam.” The most eminent example in Shakespeare of active childhood is unquestionably the part played by young Arthur in the drama of King John. It is the youth of Arthur, his dependence, his sorry inheritance of misery, his helplessness among the raging wolves about him, his childish victory over Hubert, and his forlorn death, when he leaps trembling from the walls, which impress the imagination. “Stay yet,” says Pembroke to Salisbury,— “I’ll go with thee And find the inheritance of this poor child, His little kingdom of a forced grave.” Shakespeare, busy with the story of kings, is moved with deep compassion for this child among kings, who overcomes the hard heart of Hubert by his innocent words, the very strength of feeble childhood, and falls like a poor lamb upon the stones, where his princedom could not save him. In that ghastly play of Titus Andronicus, which melts at last into unavailing tears, with what exquisite grace is the closing scene humanized by the passage where the elder Lucius calls his boy to the side of his dead grandsire:— “Come hither, boy; come, come, and learn of us To melt in showers: thy grandsire loved thee well: Many a matter hath he told to thee, Meet and agreeing with thine infancy; In that respect, then, like a loving child, Shed yet some small drops from thy tender spring, Because kind nature doth require it so.” The relentless spirit of Lady Macbeth is in nothing figured more acutely than when the woman and mother is made to say,— “I have given suck, and know How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me. I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums And dashed the brains out, had I sworn as you Have done to this.” In the witch’s hell-broth one ingredient is “finger of birth-strangled babe,” while in the portents which rise to Macbeth’s vision a bloody child and a child crowned, with a tree in his hand, are apparitions of ghostly prophecy. Then in that scene where Ross discloses slowly and with pent-up passion the murder of Macduff’s wife and children, and Macduff hears as in a dream, waking to the blinding light of horrid day, with what a piercing shriek he cries out,— “He has no children!”