CHILDREN TWO THOUSAND YEARS AGO. MHE authorities of the British
Museum are to be con- gratulated on a very successful experiment. Through a rearrangement of certain collections, it became possible lately to make use of a vacated room for a new purpose. This was the grouping together of a large number of relics belonging to the life of the early Greeks and Romans, and assorting them so as to give a clear and coherent illustration of the surroundings and furniture of Greek and Roman houses,—in a word, a picture of how the two peoples lived. Hitherto it has not been possible for the sightseer to gain such a notion without a journey, say, to Pompeii or Herculaneum. He can now obtain a very fair idea within the space of a few yards. It is an experiment which may well be amplified and extended on other lines.
The objects brought together in this most interesting collection cover, of course, a wide ground. They have hitherto been distributed throughout different rooms, add have now been set aide by side in groups; there are cases showing building materials, furniture, dress, surgical instru- ments, kitchen utensils, athletic trophies, and so on. But of all the other little groups, none, perhaps, has quite the sane fascination as the case containing the children's toys and games. No doubt there is a proper distinction belonging to the household possessions of mature and respectable eitigene, or to the delicate instruments of wise and learned surgeons, or the toilet apparatus of dainty young women. But all these things belong also to the lexicons and the dictionaries. Helmets, harness, sandals, ladles, lamps, pens, pincers, water-pumps,- they have all been duly looked out in Liddell-and-Scott and illustrated in the dictionary of antiquities, and have acquired a measure of familiarity, perhaps rather than a certain dulness, which sets them apart. There is a whiff of the declensions somewhere about them. But these nnreery toys never came out of any grammar or Grades. They belong only to the nursery, and that is to an age which can never be later than yesterday. There is, for instance, only one date to which can be assigned the leaden chariot with its two prancing horses, possibly an inch and a half high, and the leaden horse- man, cat out of a thin sheet of metal like a biacnit stamped from pastry. Both of them belong to the same period as the Little Tin Soldier who went sailing down the gutter in the paper-boat of the German fairy-tale, and the Grenadier whom Stevenson's child buried and exhumed, lamenting neverthe- less that after "all that's gone and come, I shall find my soldier dumb." Her are they worse made; nor is the tiny chair more clumsy which, belonging also to the lead age, would have brought sudden happiness to the owner of a Roman doll's-house. The date, indeed, now and then only an antiquarian, and an antiquarian who knew something about soldiers and furniture, could easily determine. Here, for instance, is a sofa made of a brown glazed ware. It is strong and solid, measures some three or four inches in length, has a back and arms of an imitation rolled pattern, would seat two or three small dolls, and is of an extremely satisfactory nature. It might have been made last week at the Doniton ware factory, if you can get sofas in Doulton ware. Here, again, is a model of a woman kneading a cake, or a roll. She has no logs, for legs would destroy the balance of the model, and prevent it being easily set upon the floor or the table. But she is cleverly pinned by the top of her skirts to her pastry-board, her arms are jointed, and she would move her rolling-pin (unfortunately lost) up and down the board as ingeniously and industriously as any sawing-bear carved at Brienz in the darkness of last winter. The Swiss and the Roman wood.carver know their business, and com- bine simplicity, regularity of movement, and imitation of the doings of " grown-ups,"—all the essentials of a proper mechanical toy.
In this market, whatever the supply may be, the demand does not vary. The first necessity, or nearly the first, is a toy capable of providing a satisfying noise. Such a
desire is met, in the collection exhibited, by two or three different specimens of rattles ; one, of a rather elegant description, a mixture between an owl and an amphora, which would probably do nicely for a girl, another, heavier and more masculine, modelled into a hollow pig.
At a little later period comes a demand for mugs to bold milk and water, and these, of course, are painted with figures of children, generally crawling for an apple or an orange on the floor, and in one case, perhaps designed for twins, with a picture of a boy and a girl teaching a neat- looking dog to jump through a hoop. In a year or so comes the parting of the ways, when the nursery demand is divided.
It was supplied two thousand years ago as it is supplied now, by models of animals and by dolls. In the one division you
get donkeys carrying panniers of loaves, negroes riding mules, a leaden Pomeranian dog apparently once painted white, a fox- terrier collared "all proper" with a fine long uncut tail and an inquisitive nose, a monkey eating a bun, and a handsome soldier with a round red shield, riding n charger with a really good hogged mane. For the dogs there would naturally be required a whistle, which modern civilisation has forgotten how to model out of mud, as it used to be modelled; and for an even later period there was to be reserved the noble joy of fishing with real hooks. There is not much more than a little rust to differentiate the best of the Roman fish-hooks from the modern product of Limerick. So much for the masculine demand and supply, unaltered throughout time. But the feminine,— the, dolls? Have they altered? Perhaps, for some children, a little. Moat of the dolls shown at Bloomsbury must have been expensive, in which they do not differ from many dolls of to-day; like modern dolls, too, they had beautifully jointed legs and arms. But the particular specimens exhibited have been little used (each once belonged, it is an unhappy thing to remember, to its proper urn), and they would not, to a modern eye, hold out strong attractions to a child. Some of them are carved already dressed, and some possibly were meant to be dressed, or wrapped up, by their owners. But they are all of them models of grown-up girls and women, and it is not easy to see why a child should have been supposed to want to nurse them. It is difficult to be certain about these dolls,—except one. That is a rag-doll, faded and yellow. The others are elegant things to hold, or to be brought out to show to visitors on grand occasions. But this one was some little child's baby.
The status of the child's toy has hardly altered through twenty-five centuries. How far has the status of the owner of the toys P Not, that is, in regard to educational problems, but in regard to the simple relations of child and parent, or children and the community. Of course, the essential natural bold of motherhood upon a woman must always have been equally strong. But in the days in which these dolls and toys were made, if mothers and fathers were not unkind to their own children, they could certainly be hideously cruel to the children of others. Andromache, lamenting over the dead Hector, bewails the miserable fate, not of herself, but of her little son, who will be spurned, hungry and pleading, from the tables of his feasting companions ; " Thy father sits not at our board !" That is doubtless a true enough picture of the fate of an orphan in the Homeric age. It is unthinkable of a modern State, but it was the mime cruelty which survived in the most cultured age of Greece, and which allowed the conquering Spartans to massacre their Plataean prisoners in cold blood, or the Athenians to pass a vote condemning five thousand Mytileneans to death. It was, indeed, part of a general fierceness, natural to young communities perpetually at war, which was not checked, and could not disappear, until after the teaching of a new religion. We are too far off the coming of the change to perceive easily how great the change has been. But it can be at least appreciated by contrasting the frequent preaching of the gospel of gentleness to all children in the Christian religion with the almost complete absence of passages, in the pagan writings of Greece and Rome, dealing with affection for children other than the natural love of the parent for his son or daughter.
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