245.  Having gotten over these thorny places as quickly as possible, I gladly come back to the BABIES; with regard to whom I shall have no prejudices, no affectation, no false pride, no sham fears to encounter; every heart (except there be one made of flint) being with me here.  ’Then were there brought unto him little children, that he should put his hands on them, and pray:  and the disciples rebuked them.  But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not to come unto me; for of such is the kingdom of heaven.’  A figure most forcibly expressive of the character and beauty of innocence, and, at the same time, most aptly illustrative of the doctrine of regeneration.  And where is the man; the woman who is not fond of babies is not worthy the name; but where is the man who does not feel his heart softened; who does not feel himself become gentler; who does not lose all the hardness of his temper; when, in any way, for any purpose, or by any body, an appeal is made to him in behalf of these so helpless and so perfectly innocent little creatures?

246.  SHAKSPEARE, who is cried up as the great interpreter of the human heart, has said, that the man in whose soul there is no music, or love of music, is ‘fit for murders, treasons, stratagems, and spoils.’  ’Our immortal bard,’ as the profligate SHERIDAN used to call him in public, while he laughed at him in private; our ‘immortal bard’ seems to have forgotten that Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, were flung into the fiery furnace (made seven times hotter than usual) amidst the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, and dulcimer, and all kinds of music; he seems to have forgotten that it was a music and a dance-loving damsel that chose, as a recompense for her elegant performance, the bloody head of John the Baptist, brought to her in a charger; he seems to have forgotten that, while Rome burned, Nero fiddled:  he did not know, perhaps, that cannibals always dance and sing while their victims are roasting; but he might have known, and he must have known, that England’s greatest tyrant, Henry VIII., had, as his agent in blood, Thomas Cromwell, expressed it, ’his sweet soul enwrapped in the celestial sounds of music;’ and this was just at the time when the ferocious tyrant was ordering Catholics and Protestants to be tied back to back on the same hurdle, dragged to Smithfield on that hurdle, and there tied to, and burnt from, the same stake.  Shakspeare must have known these things, for he lived immediately after their date; and if he had lived in our day, he would have seen instances enough of ’sweet souls’ enwrapped in the same manner, and capable, if not of deeds equally bloody, of others, discovering a total want of feeling for sufferings not unfrequently occasioned by their own wanton waste, and waste arising, too, in part, from their taste for these ’celestial sounds.’