And blest your waking be,
When morning’s gold and ruddy beams
Restore your smiles to me.”[[433]]
The philosopher Chrysippos[[434]] considered it of importance to regulate the songs of nurses, and Quintilian,[[435]] with a quaint but pardonable enthusiasm, would have the boy who is designed to be an orator placed under the care of a nurse of polished language and superior mind. He observes,[[436]] too, that children suckled and brought up by dumb nurses, will remain themselves dumb, which would necessarily happen had they no other person with whom to converse. When the infant was extremely wakeful the soothing influence of the song was heightened by the aid of little timbrels and rattles hung with bells.
A very characteristic anecdote is told of Anacreon apropos of nurses.[[437]] A good-humoured wench with a child in her arms happening one day to be sauntering more nutricum, through the Panionion, or Grand Agora of Ionia, encountered the Teïan poet, who returning from the Bacchic Olympos, found the streets much too narrow for him, and went reeling hither and thither as if determined to make the most of his walk. The nurse, it is to be presumed, felt no inclination to dispute the passage with him; but Anacreon attracted, perhaps, by her pretty face, making a timely lurch, sent both her and her charge spinning off the pavement, at the same time muttering something disrespectful against “the brat.” Now, for her own part, the girl felt no resentment against him, for she could see which of the divinities was to blame; but loving, as a nurse should, her boy, she prayed that the poet might one day utter many words in praise of him whom he had so rudely vituperated; which came to pass accordingly, for the infant was the celebrated Cleobulos, whose beauty the Teïan afterwards celebrated in many an ode.[[438]]
Traces of the remotest antiquity still linger in the nursery. The word baby, which we bestow familiarly on an infant, was with little variation, in use many thousand years ago among the Syrians, in whose nursery dialect babia[[439]] had the same signification. Tatta, too, pappa and mamma[[440]] were the first words lisped by the children of Hellas. And from various hints dropped by ancient authors, it seems clear that the same wild stories and superstitions that still flourish there haunted the nursery of old. The child was taught to dread Empusa or Onoskelis or Onoskolon,[[441]] the monster with one human foot and one of brass, which dwelt among the shades of night and glided through dusky chambers and dismal passages to devour “naughty children.” The fables which filled up this obscure part of Hellenic mythology, were scarcely less wild than those the Arabs tell about their Marids, their Efreets, and their Jinn; for Empusa, the phantom minister of Hecate,[[442]] could assume every various form of God’s creatures, appearing sometimes as a bull, or a tree, or an ass, or a stone, or a fly, or a beautiful woman.[[443]] Shakspeare, having caught, perhaps, some glimpse of this superstition, or inventing in a kindred spirit, attributes a similar power of transformation to his mischievous elf in the Midsummer Night’s Dream, located on Empusa’s native soil.
“I’ll follow you, I’ll lead you about, around,
Through bog, through bush, through brake, through briar.
Sometimes a horse I’ll be, sometime a hound,
A hog, a headless bear, sometimes a fire,