Happily a major number of small girls still carry a high heart, knowing that maids, as well as men, may be “little, very little, but not insignificant.”
Those words are Sir Walter Scott’s in reference to Thomas Moore, whose pseudonym, it may be remembered, was at one time Thomas Little.
This is perhaps the place in which to say a word about the persons whose littleness is bound up with their fame. One of the greatest generals of all time had for his best known soubriquet “the little corporal.” Omit the “little” in that case, and the appellation is robbed of all that gives piquancy to it.
How much there may be in the mere word “little” is shown in the following—true—story.
A living sculptor of note, a foreigner residing in London, made a tender group composed of a mother and her child. The mother was counting the baby’s toes, and beneath the group was carved a legend which the artist conceived to embody a familiar nursery rhyme. The legend ran, “One pig went to market.”
Ah, von leettle peeg—oui, oui!
“Sir, sir!” remonstrated an Irishwoman, to whose inspection the group was subjected, “you’ve made a terrible omission. You’ve left out ‘little.’ No human mother would sing to her babe, ‘One pig went to market.’”
The foreign sculptor beat his breast.
The ironical use of big for small and small for big is a thing of old custom. Thus one of the biggest English Johns who ever lived was known to his contemporaries, and is still known to those who cherish his memory, as Little John, and it is by a similar pleasantry, according to a learned writer, that Maria, who in Shakespeare’s play of Twelfth Night is represented as a little woman, is called by Viola “Olivia’s giant,” and that Sir Toby says to her “Good-night, Penthesilea,” meaning by Penthesilea amazon, if his meaning was not merely (and to me this seems to be the more likely thing) to twit the little woman by giving her a long name.