"Who remindeth me of the sins of my infancy? 'For in Thy sight none is pure from sin, not even the infant whose life is but a day upon the earth.' (Job xxv. 4.) Who remindeth me? Doth not each little infant, in whom I see what of myself I remember not? What then was my sin? Was it that I hung upon the breast and cried?"—St. Austin, Confess., lib. i. 7.
"For man's sake it should seeme that Nature made and produced all other creatures besides; though this great favour of hers, so bountifull and beneficiall in that respect, hath cost them full deere. Insomuch as it is hard to judge, whether in so doing she hath done the part of a kind mother, or a hard and cruell stepdame. For first and foremost, of all other living creatures, man she hath brought forth all naked, and cloathed him with the good and riches of others. To all the rest she hath given sufficient to clad them everie one according to their kind; as namely shells, cods, hard hides, prickes, shagge, bristles, haire, downe, feathers, quils, skailes, and fleeces of wool. The verie trunkes and stemmes of trees and plants, shee hath defended with bark and rind, yea, and the same sometime double against the injuries both of heat and cold: man alone, poore wretch, she hath laid all naked upon the bare earth, even on his birth-day, to cry and wraule presently from the very first houre that he is borne into this world: in suche sort as, among so many living creatures, there is none subject to shed teares and weepe like him. And verily to no babe or infant is it given once to laugh before he be fortie daies old, and that is counted verie early and with the soonest.... The child of man thus untowardly borne, and who another day is to rule and command all other, loe how he lyeth bound hand and foot, weeping and crying, and beginning his life with miserie, as if he were to make amends and satisfaction by his punishment unto Nature, for this onely fault and trespass, that he is borne alive."—Plinie's Naturall Historie, by Phil. Holland, Lond. 1601, fol., intr. to b. vii.
The following queries are extracted from Sir Thomas Browne's "Common-place Books," Aristotle, Lib. Animal.:
"Whether till after forty days children, though they cry, weep not; or, as Scaliger expresseth it, 'Vagiunt sed oculis siccis.'
"Whether they laugh not upon tickling?
"Why, though some children have been heard to cry in the womb, yet so few cry at their birth, though their heads be out of the womb?"—Bohn's ed. iii. 358.
Thompson follows Pliny, and says that man is "taught alone to weep" ("Spring," 350.); but—not to speak of the
"Cruel crafty crocodile,
Which, in false grief hiding his harmful guile,
Doth weep full sore and sheddeth tender tears,"
as Spenser sings—the camel weeps when over-loaded, and the deer when chased sobs piteously. Thompson himself in a passage he has stolen from Shakspeare, makes the stag weep:
——"he stands at bay;
The big round tears run down his dappled face;