All the world over the singing of the nurse has been proverbial. Music breathes its sweetest notes around our cradles. The voice of woman soothes our infancy and our age, and in Greece, where every class of the community had its song, the nurse naturally vindicated one to herself.[430] This sweetest of all melodies— “Redolent of joy and youth” was technically denominated Katabaukalesis, of which scraps and fragments only, like those of the village song which lingered in the memory of Rousseau, have come down to us. The first verse of a Roman nursery air, which still, Pignorius[431] tells us, was sung in his time by the mothers of Italy, ran thus:— “Lalla, Lalla; dorme aut lacte. Lalla, Lalla; sleep or suck.” Footnote 430: Ilgen. de Scol. Poes. p. xxvi. Casaub. ad Theoph. Char. p. 204. seq. Footnote 431: De Serv. p. 186. seq. Cf. Athen. xiv. 10. The Sicilian poet, whose pictures of the ancient world are still so fresh and fragrant, has bequeathed to us a Katabaukalesis of extreme beauty and brevity which I have here paraphrastically translated:[432]— “Sleep ye, that in my breast have lain, The slumber sweet and light, And wake, my glorious twins, again To glad your mother’s sight. O happy, happy be your dreams, And blest your waking be, When morning’s gold and ruddy beams Restore your smiles to me.”[433] Footnote 432: A nurse’s lay prevalent among our own ancestors may not inaptly find a place here: “Now suck, child, and sleep, child, thy mother’s own joy, Her only sweet comfort to drown all annoy; For beauty, surpassing the azurèd sky, I love thee, my darling, as ball of mine eye.” D’Israeli, Amenities of Literature ii. 287. Footnote 433: Theoc. Eidyll. 24. 7. sqq. The philosopher Chrysippos[434] considered it of importance to regulate the songs of nurses, and Quintilian,[435] with a quaint but pardonable enthusiasm, would have the boy who is designed to be an orator placed under the care of a nurse of polished language and superior mind. He observes,[436] too, that children suckled and brought up by dumb nurses, will remain themselves dumb, which would necessarily happen had they no other person with whom to converse. When the infant was extremely wakeful the soothing influence of the song was heightened by the aid of little timbrels and rattles hung with bells. Footnote 434: Quintil. i. 10. Footnote 435: Instit. Orat. i. 1. Footnote 436: Quintil. Inst. Orat. l. x. c. i. Herod. ii. 2.