Page from Diary of Anna Green Winslow
The matter read by those children is clearly indicated by their commonplace books. One entry shows evidence of light reading. It is of riddles which are headed "Guesses"; they are the ones familiar to us all in Mother Goose's Melodies to-day. The answers are written in a most transparent juvenile shorthand. Thus the answer, "Well," is indicated by the figures 23, 5, 12, 12, referring to the position of the letters in the alphabet.
The usual entries are of a religious character; extracts from sermons, answers from the catechism, verses of hymns, accompany stilted religious aspirations and appeals. In them a painful familiarity with and partiality for quotations bearing on hell and the devil show the religious teaching of the times.
CHAPTER IX
CHILDISH PRECOCITY
Where babies, much to their surprise,
Were born astonishingly wise;
With every Science on their lips,
And Latin at their finger-tips.
—Bab Ballads. W. S. Gilbert, 1877.
The seventeenth century was in Europe a period of eager development and hasty harvesting; English boys were made serious-minded by the conditions they saw around them, as well as by a forcing-house system of education, begun at very early years. This early ageing is reflected in the writings of the times. The Religio Medici, apparently the composition of a man of the large experience and serene contemplation of extreme age, was written by Sir Thomas Browne when he was but thirty.