he alludes to the old superstition, still deeply rooted in the minds of the lower orders, that a clever child never lives long. In Bright’s “Treatise of Melancholy” (1586, p. 52), we read: “I have knowne children languishing of the splene, obstructed and altered in temper, talke with gravity and wisdom surpassing those tender years, and their judgments carrying a marvellous imitation of the wisdome of the ancient, having after a sort attained that by disease, which others have by course of yeares; whereof I take it the proverb ariseth, that ‘they be of shorte life who are of wit so pregnant.’” There are sundry superstitious notions relating to the teething of children prevalent in our own and other countries. In “3 Henry VI.” (v. 6), the Duke of Gloster, alluding to the peculiarities connected with his, birth, relates how
“The midwife wonder’d; and the women cried
‘O, Jesus bless us, he is born with teeth!’
And so I was; which plainly signified
That I should snarl, and bite, and play the dog.”
It is still believed, for instance, in many places, that if a child’s first tooth appears in the upper jaw it is an omen of its dying in infancy; and when the teeth come early it is regarded as an indication that there will soon be another baby. In Sussex there is a dislike to throwing away the cast teeth of children, from a notion that, should they be found and gnawed by any animal, the child’s new tooth would be exactly like the animal’s that had bitten the old one. In Durham, when the first teeth come out the cavities must be filled with salt, and each tooth burned, while the following words are repeated:
“Fire, fire, burn bone,
God send me my tooth again.”
In the above passage, then, Shakespeare simply makes the Duke of Gloster refer to that extensive folk-lore associated with human birth, showing how careful an observer he was in noticing the whims and oddities of his countrymen.
Again, one of the foremost dangers supposed to hover round the new-born infant was the propensity of witches and fairies to steal the most beautiful and well-favored children, and to leave in their places such as were ugly and stupid. These were usually called “changelings.” Shakespeare alludes to this notion in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (ii. 1), where Puck says:
“Because that she, as her attendant, hath
A lovely boy, stol’n from an Indian king;
She never had so sweet a changeling.”
And further on, in the same scene, Oberon says:
“I do but beg a little changeling boy,
To be my henchman.”
As a fairy is, in each case, the speaker, the changeling in this case denotes the child taken by them. So, too, in the “Winter’s Tale” (iii. 3), in the passage where the Shepherd relates: “it was told me, I should be rich by the fairies; this is some changeling:—open’t.” As the child here found was a beautiful one, the changeling must naturally mean the child stolen by the fairies, especially as the gold left with it is conjectured to be fairy gold. The usual signification, however, of the term changeling is thus marked by Spenser (“Fairy Queen,” I. x. 65).