TOYS OF OTHER DAYS.*
THERE is such a wealth of material in this book that it is almost as difficult to choose a toy or a period for special notice as it is to bay a present in a shop at Christmas-time. One of the things, however, that strike the reader most is the change- lessness of the main types of toys. Dolls, balls, and carts have been made and loVed for countless ages. The rag-doll stuffed with papyrus, now in the South Kensington Museum, which was played with at Bebneseh in the third century before Christ, does not differ in any essential way from the same make of doll in our own nurseries, and a four-thousand- year-old ball might have been made yesterday. - Owing to the custom of burying toys with a dead child, which was observed from remote ages until the beginning of the Christian era, " we are now able to see, touch, and handle the identical playthings of the children of archaic times." When the Greek and Roman youths and maidens took their dis- carded toys to the temple of a god or goddess, they did not think that they were laying up knowledge for posterity. The Japanese have a plan of keeping beautiful antique dolls and furniture shut up all the year, except on the day of the Girls Festival, when "rice and bowls of sake, are offered" before them, " after which the toys are put away until the following year." To our notions this mere glimpse of such attractive things must he a poor sort of "festival" to the little girls, but grown-up connoisseurs profit by the arrangement. If they may not break their toys, the little Japanese are com- pensated in another way. Among some of Hokusai's beautiful drawings reproduced here there is one called "A Village Scene." "A large drum is set up so that the children may satisfy their love of a noise," and there they are thumping away, with the older people looking on encouragingly. Most of the old playthings are miniature reproductions of the things the men and women were using. They were made by the same workmen and of the same materials as the full-sized ones, and they are therefore a valuable addition to our knowledge of the details of life in other days. Take, for example, the old Egyptian toy kitchen utensils, and " a chariot baked in clay, found at Thebes, three and a half inches long." - " Weapons and Soldier Play " is a particularly interesting chapter. The present writer remembers being told by a very old man that the toy swords made for the little King of Rome's boy-army were sold in London, and that he and his brothers were given some of them. We wonder whether any are still in existence. "The toy flint-lock guns, from the pattern- book of a toymaker in Paris in the First Empire," of which there is a picture, were perhaps intended for the same use. The many illustrations (full-page and in the text) add greatly to the pleasdre and profit of the reader, who will find plenty to interest him in this attractive volume.
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