The memory of every student of English poetry will furnish countless parallels to thoughts like these. How is it that no similar poem could be quoted from the whole range of ancient literature? How is it that to the Greek and Roman poets that morning of life, which should have been so filled with "natural blessedness," seems to have been a blank? How is it that writers so voluminous, so domestic, so affectionate as Cicero, Virgil, and Horace do not make so much as a single allusion to the existence of their own mothers? To answer this question fully would be to write an entire essay on the difference between ancient and modern life, and would carry me far away from my immediate subject.[1] But I may say generally, that the explanation rests in the fact that in all probability childhood among the ancients was a disregarded, and in most cases a far less happy, period than it is with us. The birth of a child in the house of a Greek or a Roman was not necessarily a subject for rejoicing. If the father, when the child was first shown to him, stooped down and took it in his arms, it was received as a member of the family; if he left it unnoticed then it was doomed to death, and was exposed in some lonely or barren place to the mercy of the wild beasts, or of the first passer by. And even if a child escaped this fate, yet for the first seven or eight years of life he was kept in the gynaeceum, or women's apartments, and rarely or never saw his father's face. No halo of romance or poetry was shed over those early years. Until the child was full grown the absolute power of life or death rested in his father's hands; he had no freedom, and met with little notice. For individual life the ancients had a very slight regard; there was nothing autobiographic or introspective in their temperament. With them public life, the life of the State, was everything; domestic life, the life of the individual, occupied but a small share of their consideration. All the innocent pleasures of infancy, the joys of the hearth, the charm of the domestic circle, the flow and sparkle of childish gaity, were by them but little appreciated. The years before manhood were years of prospect, and in most cases they offered but little to make them worth the retrospect. It is a mark of the more modern character which stamps the writings of Seneca, as compared with earlier authors, that he addresses his mother in terms of the deepest affection, and cannot speak of his darling little son except in a voice that seems to break with tears. [Footnote 1: See, however, the same question treated from a somewhat different point of view by M. Nisard, in his charming _Études sur les Poëtes de la Décadence_, ii. 17, _sqq_.]