ay of his five years.

Ah! the word "hopeful" seems, to us, in this day, a word too flattering
to the estate of man. They thought their little boy strangely hopeful
because he was so quick on his way to be something else. They lost the
timely perfection the while they were so intent upon their hopes. And
yet it is our own modern age that is charged with haste!

It would seem rather as though the world, whatever it shall unlearn, must
rightly learn to confess the passing and irrevocable hour; not slighting
it, or bidding it hasten its work, nor yet hailing it, with Faust, "Stay,
thou art so fair!" Childhood is but change made gay and visible, and the
world has lately been converted to change.

Our fathers valued change for the sake of its results; we value it in the
act. To us the change is revealed as perpetual; every passage is a goal,
and every goal a passage. The hours are equal; but some of them wear
apparent wings.

_Tout passe_. Is the fruit for the flower, or the flower for the
fruit, or the fruit for the seeds which it is formed to shelter and
contain? It seems as though our forefathers had answered this question
most arbitrarily as to the life of man.

All their literature dealing with children is bent upon this haste, this
suppression of the approach to what seemed then the only time of
fulfilment. The way was without rest to them. And this because they had
the illusion of a rest to be gained at some later point of this unpausing
life.

Evelyn and his contemporaries dropped the very word child as soon as
might be, if not sooner. When a poor little boy came to be eight years
old they called him a youth. The diarist himself had no cause to be
proud of his own early years, for he was so far indulged in idleness by
an "honoured grandmother" that he was "not initiated into any rudiments"
till he was four years of age. He seems even to have been a youth of
eight before Latin was seriously begun; but this fact he is evidently, in
after years, with a total lack of a sense of humour, rather ashamed of,
and hardly acknowledges. It is difficult to imagine what childhood must
have been when nobody, looking on, saw any fun in it; when everything
that was proper to five years old was defect. A strange good conceit of
themselves and of their own ages had those fathers.

They took their children seriously, without relief. Evelyn has nothing
to say about his little ones that has a sign of a smile in it.