“I saw a Jewish lady only yesterday with a child at her knee, and from whose face towards the child there shone a sweetness so angelical that it seemed to form a sort of glory round both. I protest I could have knelt before her, too, and adored in her the divine beneficence in endowing us with the maternal _storgé_ which began with our race and sanctifies the history of mankind.” These words, which are taken from Thackeray’s _Pendennis_, may serve as a starting‐point for this paper. The fact that the great student of man perceived this glory just round the head of a Jewish lady rouses in me the hope that the small student of letters may, with a little search, be able to discover in the remains of our past many similar traces of this divine beneficence and sanctifying sentiment. Certainly the glimpses which we shall catch from the faded leaves of ancient volumes, dating from bygone times, will not be so bright as those which the novelist was so fortunate as to catch from the face of a lady whom he saw but the previous day. The mothers and fathers, about whom I am going to write in this essay, have gone long ago, and the objects of their anxiety and troubles have also long ago vanished. But what the subject will lose in brightness, it may perhaps gain in reality and intensity. A few moments of enraptured devotion do not make up the saint. It is a whole series of feelings and sentiments betrayed on different occasions, expressed in different ways, a whole life of sore troubles, of bitter disappointments, but also moments of most elevated joys and real happiness. And surely these manifestations of the divine beneficence, which appear in their brightest glory in the literature of every nation when dealing with the child, shine strongest in the literature of the Jewish nation. In it, to possess a child was always considered as the greatest blessing God could bestow on man, and to miss it as the greatest curse. The patriarch Abraham, with whom Israel enters into history, complains—“Oh Lord, what wilt Thou give me, seeing I go childless!” The Rabbis regarded the childless man as dead, whilst the Cabbalist in the Middle Ages thought of him who died without posterity as of one who had failed in his mission in this world, so that he would have to appear again on our planet to fulfil this duty. To trace out the feelings which accompanied the object of their greatest anxiety, to let them pass before the reader in some way approaching to a chronological order, to draw attention to some points more worthy of being emphasised than others, is the aim of this essay.