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New Zealand Times, Volume LXXI, Issue 4295, 2 March 1901, Page 5 (Supplement)

xiio Roman Catholic Pontiff, although quite well, is now perceptibly less able to get about than this time last year. The truth is that he sleeps muen, cats little, and occupies himself less with cares of State as the days,go by, wiwj a corresponding increase of devotional exercise. Every effort has been made to induce him to receive fewer pilgrims, and in most cases in a more informal and less fatiguing way, bur one might as well speak to the wind. 'T v/oujd rather break than rust.” ho says. -One day oiv poor life, will he snuffed out like a candle, and I want to be post.” This has become a fixed idea, and his thoughts are so turned to celestial things that he seems more a-wraith than a man His days are peaceful, and his apartments more comfortable than would over be suspected from the bleak, bald exterior of the palace, and from those rooms seen by the tourist when “doing” the galleries. .1 iis whole private .suite is heated by steam, not ioo warm, so that he runs a minimum of risk in going into St. Peter s. It is lighted with clectrio light, softly shaded to suit his eyes, but brilliant enough to write and read by. Thus the icneiable Pontiff spends tre evening of his life, happy, peaceful and respected Uy ■he whole world.

Mr William Canton, has made a collection of children’s sayings, and the London “Spectator 1 ' thinks the book will be read with pleasure. Childhood is charming to most people, even though they have no children, or at least none after the flesh. They may, perhaps, love those of their' neighbours, or, like Charles Lamb, they may occasionally please themselves with “dream children. Bachelors’ children,” George Elliot calls these fancy babes, who, she says, “are always young, immortal cliildren; always lisping, wandering, helpless, with a chance of turning out good.” Anyhow, we have all known and cared for one child. The child we recollect, a child who pleased itself with a ‘‘dream man,” «s far, alas, from the truth as any baAelor’s child.

The child is a comparatively new subject of study. Before the present century—before Cowper, at least—we hardly know what our ancestors were like. Great painters have preserved for jts tho similitude of their stiff little persons, but what they thought and did and suffered and fancied we do not know. It is strange, for instance, that Shakespeare never should have drawn a child. Mamilius is the merest sketch, and Prince Arthur is not a child at all. He is a rhetorical youth, whose want of naturalness we forget in the beauty of his language and the sadness of his circumstances. Of course, Shakespeare could have painted children had he wished; presumably, therefore, he was not interested in them —or knew that his audience was not. Later on tho poet Vaugbau, though he was keenly, one might even say fervently. interested in childhood, shows us no children. He did not watch in order to depict them, but he sought in the study of child nature to find the way of salvation. Profoundly impressed with the reiterated command of Christ to become as cliildren, he was for ever trying to realise that attitude towards life which he believed would alone enable a man to get through the straight gate. To such a poet as Tauglian the keynote of childhood, 'which is the power of fancy, could not fail to appeal. _ ‘ Those white designs which children drive enchant him no loss than their innocence. But all he says of them is by way of criticism or worship, never of Croatian or portraiture.

At the end of the last century Oowper drew himself as a child, and a charming picture he made. He wrote, too, about, other boys in order to bring their illusage at public schools home to the minds of his generation, but, unless in the lines folds mother’s portrait, he did not writ© of children as they an* ten of now—Louis Stevenson wrote of them, for instance—for the pure love of them, with no desire to rectify an abuse, point a moral or seek a phyTo our mind, nothing has ever been written about children as graceful and true as “The Child’s Garden of Verses. The poetry of children’s make-believe—- “ Their combination of mild imagination and sound common sense,' as Mr Canton calls it—has never been so well dcscribed as by Louis Stevenson. Almost on every page he shows us the dream of life going on simultaneously with the actual. To suggest the othicai sido of a child's mind, with no view to edification, is the work of a true artist and thus Stevenson floes m many of hiai worses, gome writers of to-dajr, sickened, P haps by a past didacticism, ignore this element altogether, and make their he - oes and heroines mere farcical little imps Children enjoy nonsense—itisthe form of humour, and as such shoiuld not l 0 religion » surety nnt 1 subiect for their innocent jests. A SSlfboySc, dxnrt washing the white robes m.lewa-noi must entail is a tiresome little no 11 \vf d must^L g ever, quote one story disappointments. A httie of a S'.fS’mbflE «4 »>“■ ft”°m her'll ew 0 toy 'to L“X.”S jift’ot ““STSre. ber your End orphan, one day of ■■ i v . “she was a stout “Yes, was the reply, „ ha if. woman what beat m • f the sssssr Solomon the words contain • Mr Canton »ve6agoc example of the picturesque speaking so common among children in the following Sen who confuse the churchyard w } th heaven. It is such a grim, though, natwe listen to children’s “sayini? with the religious poet, we watch them, to learn the way to_a better country—that is, a —or with a Ughter heart we follow Louis Stevenson to ‘‘The Fairyland afcir," “Where the little people are,” we must come to one co ndus mn-—ohildr e n have a which is not of this world. They can esfrom the tyrannies and disappointments of life into the limitless land of a land which tKeir eiders have almost forgotten, but which as Mr Joel Chandler Harris says, as.big as all outdoors,” and which everything which- everybody wants. _ It is not, far away from any child—while ho is a child The - prison -tyalls of pronabdity present no obstacle to the soaring imagination of childhood. It is only when w-e cease to be children that our- load of worldly learning becomes too heavy for the wings of the spirit.