The humours of childhood include in rich abundance both Things which would have been better left unsaid, and Things which might have been expressed differently. But just now they lack their sacred bard. There is no one to observe and chronicle them. It is a pity, for the "heart that watches and receives" will often find in the pleasantries of childhood a good deal that deserves perpetuation.

The children of fiction are a mixed company, some lifelike and some eminently the reverse. In Joan Miss Rhoda Broughton drew with unequalled skill a family of odious children. Henry Kingsley look a more genial view of his subject, and sketched some pleasant children in Austin Elliot, and some delightful ones in the last chapter of Ravenshoe. The "Last of the Neros" in Barchester Towers is admirably drawn, and all elderly bachelors must have sympathized with good Mr. Thorne when, by way of making himself agreeable to the mother, Signora Vesey-Neroni, he took the child upon his knee, jumped her up and down, saying, "Diddle, diddle, diddle," and was rewarded with, "I don't want to be diddle-diddle-diddled. Let me go, you naughty old man." Dickens's children are by common consent intolerable, but a quarter of a century ago we were all thrilled by Miss Montgomery's Misunderstood. It is credibly reported that an earlier and more susceptible generation was moved to tears by the sinfulness of Topsy and the saintliness of Eva; and the adventures of the Fairchild Family enjoy a deserved popularity among all lovers of unintentional humour. But the "sacred bard" of child-life was John Leech, whose twofold skill immortalized it with pen and with pencil. The childish incidents and sayings which Leech illustrated were, I believe, always taken from real life. His sisters "kept an establishment," as Mr. Dombey said—the very duplicate of that to which little Paul was sent. "'It is not a Preparatory School by any means. Should I express my meaning,' said Miss Tox with peculiar sweetness, 'if I designated it an infantine boarding-house of a very select description?'"

"'On an exceedingly limited and particular scale,' suggested Mrs. Chick, with a glance at her brother."

"'Oh! exclusion itself,' said Miss Tox."

The analogy may be even more closely pressed, for, as at Mrs. Pipchin's so at Miss Leech's, "juvenile nobility itself was no stranger to the establishment." Miss Tox told Mr. Dombey that "the humble individual who now addressed him was once under Mrs. Pipchin's charge;" and, similarly, the obscure writer of these papers was once under Miss Leech's. Her school supplied the originals of all the little boys, whether greedy or gracious, grave or gay, on foot or on pony-back, in knickerbockers or in nightshirts, who figure so frequently in Punch between 1850 and 1864; and one of the pleasantest recollections of those distant days is the kindness with which the great artist used to receive us when, as the supreme reward of exceptionally good conduct, we were taken to see him in his studio at Kensington. It is my rule not to quote at length from what is readily accessible, and therefore I cull only one delightful episode from Leech's Sketches of Life and Character. Two little chaps are discussing the age of a third; and the one reflectively remarks, "Well, I don't 'zactly know how old Charlie is; but he must be very old, for he blows his own nose." Happy and far distant days, when such an accomplishment seemed to be characteristic of a remotely future age! "Mamma," inquired an infant aristocrat of a superlatively refined mother, "when shall I be old enough to eat bread and cheese with a knife, and put the knife in my mouth?" But the answer is not recorded.

The vagueness of the young with respect to the age of their elders is pleasingly illustrated by the early history of a nobleman who recently represented a division of Manchester in Parliament. His mother had a maid, who seemed to childish eyes extremely old. The children of the family longed to know her age, but were much too well-bred to ask a question which they felt would be painful; so they sought to attain the desired end by a system of ingenious traps. The future Member for Manchester chanced in a lucky hour to find in his "Book of Useful Knowledge" the tradition that the aloe flowers only once in a hundred years. He instantly saw his opportunity, and accosting the maid with winning air and wheedling accent, asked insinuatingly, "Dunn, have you often seen the aloe flower?"

The Enfant Terrible, though his name is imported from France, is an indigenous growth of English soil. A young husband and wife of my acquaintance were conversing in the comfortable belief that "Tommy didn't understand," when Tommy looked up from his toys, and said reprovingly, "Mamma, oughtn't you to have said that in French?"

The late Lord ----, who had a deformed foot, was going to visit Queen Victoria at Osborne, and before his arrival the Queen and Prince Albert debated whether it would be better to warn the Prince of Wales and the Princess Royal of his physical peculiarity, so as to avoid embarrassing remarks, or to leave it to their own good feeling. The latter course was adopted. Lord ---- duly arrived. The foot elicited no remarks from the Royal children, and the visit passed off anxiously but with success. Next day the Princess Royal asked the Queen, "Where is Lord ----?" "He has gone back to London, dear." "Oh! what a pity! He had promised to show Bertie and me his foot!" They had caught him in the corridor and made their own terms with their captive.

In more recent years the little daughter of one of the Queen's most confidential advisers had the unexampled honour of being invited to luncheon with her Majesty. During the meal, an Illustrious Lady, negotiating a pigeon after the German fashion, took up one of its bones with her finger and thumb. The little visitor, whose sense of British propriety was stronger than her awe of Courts, regarded the proceeding with wonder-dilated eyes, and then burst out, "Oh, Piggy-wiggy, Piggy-wiggy! You are Piggy-wiggy." Probably she is now languishing in the dungeon keep of Windsor Castle.

If the essence of the Enfant Terrible is that he or she causes profound embarrassment to the surrounding adults, the palm of pre-eminence must be assigned to the children of a famous diplomatist, who, some twenty years ago, organized a charade and performed it without assistance from their elders. The scene displayed a Crusader knight returning from the wars to his ancestral castle. At the castle gate he was welcomed by his beautiful and rejoicing wife, to whom, after tender salutations, he recounted his triumphs on the tented field and the number of paynim whom he had slain. "And I too, my lord," replied his wife, pointing with conscious pride to a long roll of dolls of various sizes— "and I too, my lord, have not been idle." Tableau indeed!

The argumentative child is scarcely less trying than the Enfant Terrible. Miss Sellon, the foundress of English sisterhoods, adopted and brought up in her convent at Devonport a little Irish waif who had been made an orphan by the outbreak of cholera in 1849. The infant's customs and manners, especially at table, were a perpetual trial to a community of refined old maids. "Chew your food, Aileen," said Miss Sellon. "If you please, mother, the whale didn't chew Jonah," was the prompt reply of the little Romanist, who had been taught that the examples of Holy Writ were for our imitation. Answers made in examinations I forbear, as a rule, to quote, but one I must give, because it so beautifully illustrates the value of ecclesiastical observances in our elementary schools:—

Vicar. "Now, my dear, do you know what happened on Ascension Day?"

Child. "Yes, sir, please. We had buns and a swing."

Natural childhood should know nothing of social forms, and the coachman's son who described his father's master as "the man that rides in dad's carriage," showed a finely democratic instinct. But the boastful child is a very unpleasant product of nature or of art. "We've got a private master comes to teach us at home, but we ain't proud, because Ma says it's sinful," quoth Morleena Kenwigs, under her mother's instructions, when Nicholas Nickleby gave her French lessons. The infant daughter of a country clergyman, drinking tea in the nursery of the episcopal Palace, boasted that at the Vicarage they had a hen which laid an egg every day. "Oh, that's nothing," retorted the bishop's daughter; "Papa lays a foundation-stone every week."

The precocious child, even when thoroughly well-meaning, is a source of terror by virtue of its intense earnestness. In the days when Maurice first discredited the doctrine of Eternal Punishment, some learned and theological people were discussing, in a country house near Oxford, the abstract credibility of endless pain. Suddenly the child of the house (now its owner), who was playing on the hearth-rug, looked up and said, "But how am I to know that it isn't hell already, and that I am not in it?"—a question which threw a lurid light on his educational and disciplinary experiences. Some of my readers will probably recollect the "Japanese Village" at Knightsbridge—a pretty show of Oriental wares which was burnt down, just at the height of its popularity, a few years ago. On the day of its destruction I was at the house of a famous financier, whose children had been to see the show only two days before. One of them, an urchin of eight, immensely interested by the news of the fire, asked, not if the pretty things were burnt or the people hurt, but this one question, "Mamma, was it insured?" Verily, bon chat chasse de race. The children of an excellent but unfortunate judge are said to have rushed one day into their mother's drawing-room exclaiming, "Dear Mamma, may we have jam for tea? One of Papa's judgments has been upheld in the Court of Appeal." An admirable story of commercial precocity reaches me from one of the many correspondents who have been good enough to write to me in connection with this book. It may be commended to the promoters of that class of company which is specially affected by the widow, the orphan, and the curate. Two small boys, walking down Tottenham Court Road, passed a tobacconist's shop. The bigger remarked, "I say, Bill, I've got a ha'penny, and, if you've got one too, we'll have a penny smoke between us." Bill produced his copper, and Tommy diving into the shop, promptly reappeared with a penny cigar in his mouth. The boys walked side by side for a few minutes, when the smaller mildly said, "I say, Tom, when am I to have a puff? The weed's half mine." "Oh, you shut up," was the business-like reply. "I'm the Chairman of this Company, and you are only a shareholder. You can spit."

Mr. H.J. Barker, who is, I believe, what Mr. Squeers called "A Educator of Youth," has lately given us some pleasant echoes from the Board School. A young moralist recorded his judgment, that it is not cruel to kill a turkey, "if only you take it into the backyard and use a sharp knife, and the turkey is yours!" Another dogmatized thus: "Don't teese cats, for firstly, it is wrong so to do; and 2nd, cats have clawses which is longer than people think." The following theory of the Bank Holiday would scarcely commend itself to that sound economist Sir John Lubbock:—"The Banks shut up shop, so as people can't put their money in, but has to spend it." So far the rude male: it required the genius of feminine delicacy to define a Civil War as "one in which the military are unnecessarily and punctiliously civil or polite, often raising their helmets to each other before engaging in deadly combat."

The joys of childhood are a theme on which a good deal of verse has been expended. I am far from denying that they are real, but I contend that they commonly take a form which is quite inconsistent with poetry, and that the poet (like heaven) "lies about us in our infancy." "I wish every day in the year was a pot of jam," was the obviously sincere exclamation of a fat little boy whom I knew, and whom Leech would have delighted to draw. Two little London girls who had been sent by the kindness of the vicar's wife to have "a happy day in the country," narrating their experiences on their return, said, "Oh yes, mum, we did 'ave a 'appy day. We saw two pigs killed and a gentleman buried." And the little boy who was asked if he thought he should like a hymn-book for his birthday present replied that "he thought he should like a hymn-book, but he knew he should like a squirt." A small cousin of mine, hearing his big brothers describe their experiences at a Public School, observed with unction, "If ever I have a fag of my own, I will stick pins into him." But now we are leaving childhood behind, and attaining to the riper joys of full-blooded boyhood.

"O running stream of sparkling joy

To be a soaring human boy!"