“Peace! peace! Dost thou not see my baby at my breast That sucks the nurse asleep?” There is a charming illustration of the blending of the classic myth of Amor with actual childhood in these lines of A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, where Helena says, “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind: Nor hath Love’s mind of any judgment taste: Wings and no eyes figure unheedy haste: And therefore is Love said to be a child, Because in choice he is so oft beguiled. As waggish boys in games themselves forswear, So the boy Love is perjured everywhere.” In the noonday musing of Jaques, when the summer sky hung over the greenwood, and he fell to thinking of the round world and all that dwell therein, the Seven Ages of Man passed in procession before him:— “At first the infant Muling and puking in the nurse’s arms. And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school,” until the last poor shambling creature is borne off in second childhood. There are doubtless other passages which might be gleaned, but the survey is full enough to show how scantily, after all, Shakespeare has made use of the figure and the image of childhood. The reflection has led an ingenious writer to explain the fact by the circumstances of Shakespeare’s life, which hindered his study of children. “He was clearly old for his age when still a boy, and so would have associated, not with children, but with young men. His marriage as a mere lad and the scanty legends of his youth all tend in the same direction. The course of his life led him to live apart from his children in their youth; his busy life in London brought him into the interior of but few families; his son, of whom he saw but little, died young. If our supposition be true, it is a pathetic thought that the great dramatist was shut out from the one kind of companionship which, even while it is in no degree intellectual, never palls. A man, whatever his mental powers, can take delight in the society of a child, when a person of intellect far more matured, but inferior to his own, would be simply insufferable.”[32]