life.

Evelyn and his contemporaries dropped the very word child as soon as
might be, if not sooner. When a poor little boy came to be eight years
old they called him a youth. The diarist himself had no cause to be
proud of his own early years, for he was so far indulged in idleness by
an "honoured grandmother" that he was "not initiated into any rudiments"
till he was four years of age. He seems even to have been a youth of
eight before Latin was seriously begun; but this fact he is evidently, in
after years, with a total lack of a sense of humour, rather ashamed of,
and hardly acknowledges. It is difficult to imagine what childhood must
have been when nobody, looking on, saw any fun in it; when everything
that was proper to five years old was defect. A strange good conceit of
themselves and of their own ages had those fathers.

They took their children seriously, without relief. Evelyn has nothing
to say about his little ones that has a sign of a smile in it. Twice are
children, not his own, mentioned in his diary. Once he goes to the
wedding of a maid of five years old--a curious thing, but not, evidently,
an occasion of sensibility. Another time he stands by, in a French
hospital, while a youth of less than nine years of age undergoes a
frightful surgical operation "with extraordinary patience." "The use I
made of it was to give Almighty God hearty thanks that I had not been
subject to this deplorable infirmitie." This is what he says.

See, moreover, how the fashion of hurrying childhood prevailed in
literature, and how it abolished little girls. It may be that there were
in all ages--even those--certain few boys who insisted upon being
children; whereas the girls were docile to the adult ideal. Art, for
example, had no little girls. There was always Cupid, and there were the