c. The
nurse was nonplussed. The middle-class mother answers the child's
question--

"Yes, dear--with anyone in a lower position."

"That's a case," said an Irishman on hearing it, "of twopence-halfpenny
looking down on twopence," or by another comparison, it is a case of one
English grandee clapping his hands over another grandee's head. Still,
though educational influences and nine-tenths of the coterie of society
wage war against sign-language, ill-mannered men and badly-behaved
children must always be with us.

"'Tis rude to laugh" is another precept of the hypercritical mother.
Why? Goodness only knows!--for none but a pompous blockhead or a solemn
prig will pretend that he never relaxes. But let ancient Plato, brimful
as he was of philosophy, answer the question "When not to laugh?"

Indulging one day in idle waggery, Plato, on seeing a staid disciple
approach, suddenly exclaimed to his fellows, "Let's be wise now, for I
see a fool coming," and under hypocrisy's mask all merriment ceased.

Agesilaus in mere sport romped with his children, and delighted them by
riding on a stick round the nursery, possibly singing, after the manner
of many a modern rollicking nursery-loving father--

"Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross."

With men, however, kingly proclamations, laws, empires pass away and are
forgotten, time obliterates their memories, but in Child Land all the
inhabitants, from the tiniest crower to the ten-year-old boy, show an
eager appreciation in the conservation of the pleasing lore contained in
the lullabies, the jingles, the tales, the riddles, the proverbs, and
the games of the nursery classics.

And what terrible critics these babies are! What a perverse preference
they have for the soft jingle of nonsensical melody; blank verse with
its five accents and want of rhythm does not soothe: they must have
the--

"Lalla, lalla, lalla,
Aut dormi, aut lacta"

of their prototype of Roman days.

How they revel and delight in the mother's measured song of--

"Dance, little baby, dance up high,
Never mind, baby, mother is nigh;
Crow and caper, caper and crow,
There, little baby, there you go.
Up to the ceiling, down to the ground,
Backwards and forwards, round and round;
So dance, little baby, and mother will sing,
With a high cockolorum and tingle, ting ting."

Or--

"With a merry, gay coral, and tingle, ting ting."[A]

FOOTNOTES:

[A] First