🥀 Children have a fastidiousness that time is slow to cure. It is to be wondered, for example, whether if the elderly were half as hungry as children are they would yet find so many things at table to be detestable. It is this childish dislike of many foods and drinks that makes the once general rule of thwarting the tastes of children somewhat cruel and more than a little unsalutary. For the omnivorous parent some discipline of this kind might not be amiss; but for a critical and discriminating child it was tyranny. Charles Dickens, to whom four or five generations of children have owed a quite incalculable debt, shows us Pip at the breakfast-table of Mr. Pumblechook. Dickens remembered, or imagined perfectly, the thoughts hidden in a child’s heart at the sight of the meal of an elderly _gourmand_ who asks questions in arithmetic between his mouthfuls while the child, on a very ascetic diet, has to guess the answers. Dickens was so dramatic that he could not see the sombre children of discipline observing while the grown-up people ate, without thinking their thoughts; he comes to the rescue of the desperate insufficiency of their own expression.

🥀 Not only once, or twice, does he make their stature, their protest and their lowering little vigilance his own. He knew what the deprived child thought of him and of the other guests, and he was the only guest who cared. That no one else seemed to have any sensitiveness as to the daily incident of those times says much for the robust unconsciousness of the old, and is really wonderful. How was it that people who cared at all for any opinion should care nothing for the opinion of children because it was disguised in the manners they were compelled to wear? Burns cared somewhat for the ill-opinion of a field-mouse.

🥀 What an insensibility, too, to the after-judgments, to the memories put away for the future! Ruskin has a certain unavowed pride in his early hardships, seems to admire his mother for depriving him of toys, and for making him peel the walnuts (of which he might never eat) for his father’s portly guests. Well, as to health, walnuts for the elderly who had just dined must needs be worse than walnuts for the child who had dined long before. But if Ruskin, remaining, in his greatness, so much the boy of his mother, the son of his father, even the child of his nurse, in his lifelong duty to them, respected their administration, there is another author who some years ago delighted to write of himself chiefly owing to rancour against his aunts, long dead. Mr. Hare was a child of that unjust time. Many scores of later wrongs must have been, we must hope, forgiven by him during all the years in which he remembered the oppressors of his early years. That he was really oppressed he has left us no room to doubt; his uncles and aunts have not been permitted to rest in the world’s oblivion—he has made a close record of their tyrannies. But he does not seize the heart of the matter as Dickens seizes it, reading in the urchin hearts of the children of his friends. Neither Victor Hugo nor George Eliot has written quite like Dickens, from within the boundaries of a child’s nature, from a child’s stage of progress, and without the preoccupation and attitude of older experience.

🥀 That children have to be taught self-denial is a truth that the self-indulgent youth, middle-age, and old-age now alive, and having children in charge, would blush to publish. Example is a good way to teach them. Our immediate forefathers did not teach that way, if we may judge from these records. They seem to have taught that self-denial was good for the innocent but not for the more or less guilty. Let us suppose then that they reasoned in this comfortable way: “Children have a keen pleasure in life—among other things a perpetual appetite.” Here is the injustice, for children have a thousand distastes; things are tedious to them. We have no right to attribute to them a belief in fairies or an unwearied delight in bread and milk, things which are alien to their simple hearts. We have now learnt that the children should have many and various pleasures; and we shall perhaps give them their own when we no longer grasp so many kinds of delights for ourselves, and when we thus gradually reverse the older order and correct the newer.

🥀 If the French share their days and their dinners—perhaps their too abundant dinners too abundantly—with their children more than we do even yet, they have this in their favour—that no French Mr. Hare has so dealt with his aunts, or has had so much unsalutary trouble, brought about with infinite pains and deliberation, to outgrow and outlive as a memory the better things of life.

🥀 Saint Monica did not impose all the fasting on the little Saint Augustine. She took her share, and more.