Still more decidedly, however, on the point speaks Cicero (de Senectute):
"Si quis Deus mihi largiatur ut ea hâc ætate repuerescam, et in cunis vagiam, valde recusem."
The following passage is also at A. C.'s service, provided you can find space for it, and there are "no questions asked" as to its whereabouts:
"I have heard them say that our childhood's hours are the happiest time of our earthly race; and they speak with regret of their summer bowers, and the mirth they knew in the butterfly chase; and they sorrow to think that those days are past, when their young hearts bounded with lightsome glee, when, by none of the clouds of care o'ercast, the sun of their joy shone cheerily. But, oh! they surely forget that the boy may have grief of his own that strikes deep in his heart; that an angry frown, or a broken toy, may inflict for a time a cureless smart; and that little pain is as great to him as a weightier woe to an older mind. Aye! the harsh reproof, or unfavoured whim, may be sharp as a pang of a graver kind. Then, how dim-sighted and thoughtless are those, who would they were frolicsome children and free; they should rather rejoice to have fled from the woes that hung o'er them once so heavily. In misfortune's rude shocks the practised art of the man may perchance disclose relief; but the child, in his innocence of heart, will bow 'neath the stroke of a trifling grief."
W. T. M.
Hong Kong.
Muscipula (Vol. viii., p. 229.—The Name Lloyd.—Besides the translation of this poem by Dr. Hoadly, of which a note in Dodsley informs us that the author, Holdsworth, said it was "exceedingly well done," I have before me another, printed in London for R. Gosling, 1715, with an engraved frontispiece, illustrative of the triumphant reception of Taffy's invention. The depredations of the mouse are illustrated in the various figures around, as cheeses burrowed through, even the invasion of a sleeping Welshman's very ερκος οδοντων, &c. The title is, The Mouse-Trap, a Poem done from the original Latin in Milton's Stile:
"Ludus animo debet aliquando dari,
Ad cogitandum melior ut redeat tibi"—Phæd.
Both translations are in blank verse, but that of the latter is very blank indeed, and possesses little in common with Milton's style, except the absence of rhyme. It thus begins: