Girl of Bygone Days

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 260, 2 November 1935, Page 1 (Supplement)

Girl of Bygone Days

IN a brief article such as, this one must necessarily be, it is not possible to T~ describe at any length the children of the different periods. The prehistoric girl is curiously indistinct. She seems to lurk, an uncouth, unwanted little soul, in caves and recesses, while her brothers went bravely forth to hunt with their father. But she is there, and, strange though it may seem, a relic of these far-off days was found some years ago, when in a cave at Mentone, the bones of a girl of the Aurignacian era (roughly 25,000-18,000 8.C.) were discovered. Innumerable centuries slip by. We find young girls of ancient Babylonia learning writing, grammar and arithmetic—we 'see them playing upon their harps, and helping their families in the fields. And we come to ancient Greece, and read of children within the walls of Troy, leading free and happy lives. From Greece we turn to the Roman Empire, and see demure, industrious little damsels, learning their letters and figures in austere surroundings. They had toys, too — dolls and tiny bronze or ivory animals, chariots and models of gladiators. The affection the Romans exhibited for their little girl children was extraordinary and quite touching, and nowhere is it more evident than in epitaphs written after their deaths. Of one wee child the poet Martial wrote:— Underneath this greedy stone Lies little sweet Erotion, Whom the fates with hearts as cold Nipped away at six years old. The little Erotion mentioned was a slave child, born in captivity in Martial's house, and he seems to have made a playmate of the pretty, auburn-haired baby, "fairer than Indian pearls, or newly polished ivory, or newly fallen snow."

Even more heart-haunting is the epitaph on a small tablet unearthed at York:—"D.M. Simpliciae Florentine, anime innocentissime, que vixit menses decern, Felicius Simplex pater fecit Leg. VI." (To .the sacred shades of Simplicia Florentina, a most innocent being, who lived for ten months Felicius Simplex of the victorious Sixth Legion, her father, erected this.)

Skipping the dark ages, the days Df feudal Europe, and the middle ages, we come to the fifteenth century and see the little girls of Renaissance Italy and France. One of the most interesting and brilliant of these was Isabella tl'Este, daughter of Ercole d'Estc, Duke of Ferrara. The court of Ferrara, where Isabella and her dark-haired younger sister grew up, was one of the most cultured and magnificent in Italy,

To make a survey of children through the ages is to watch the gradual progress of civilisation from the time when King - Akhnaten of Egypt took his five small daughters to worship the Sun God, to the present day, when little princesses of Royal Houses travel by air and enjoy the freedom and pleasures of a modem age.

and visitors never failed to be enchanted by the wit and grace of the pretty, auburn-haired child. The little girl whose picture appears on our page lived about 100 years later. Her name was Maria, and she was a daughter of the Medici family, the first of the great Italian ruling families to spread the new movement of the Renaissance. From Renaissance Italy we cross to Tudor England, and find there children whose names have figured largely in history. Anne Boleyn's wee daughter, in time to be the famous Queen Elizabeth, the unhappy Mary, most tragic of all the Tudor girls, and Sir Thomas More's wise and gracious daughters. Of these girls it has been said that never was a family more remarkable in its learning than was Margaret, Elizabeth and Cecilia More, and their cousin Margaret Giggs. Sir Thomas took a lively interest in the studies of these four girls, but.it was his "sweet Megg" of whom he was most proud, and when he was away at Court wrote constantly to her. And so, skipping the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we come to the nineteenth and find wee Marjorie Flemirfg,- Sir Walter Scott's beloved "Pet Marjorie." Marjorie's span of .life was short; she was born in 1803 and died in 1811. Yet into that short span she crowded as much perception, emotion, ecstasy and despair as is usually crowded into a normal lifetime—and more. She was indeed a "faery's child." Marjorie was eight when, at a boarding ■school at Kirkcaldy, she died. So down the avenue of the years we see them, a procession of little girls, demure or high spirited, childish or gravely . wise—growing from babyhood to girlhood, loving and being loved, from times prehistoric to th>s year of grace in the twentieth century.