Grant that this may be a little abated, because a very serious man is not to be too much believed when he is describing what he admires; it is the very fact of his admiration that is so curious a sign of those hasty times.  All being favourable, the child of Evelyn’s studious home would have done all these things in the course of nature within a few years.  It was the fact that he did them out of the course of nature that was, to Evelyn, so exquisite.  The course of nature had not any beauty in his eyes.  It might be borne with for the sake of the end, but it was not admired for the majesty of its unhasting process.  Jeremy Taylor mourns with him “the strangely hopeful child,” who—­without Comenius’s “Janua” and without congruous syntax—­was fulfilling, had they known it, an appropriate hope, answering a distinctive prophecy, and crowning and closing a separate expectation every day 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, not 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.