s; his ardent affections, his
exultations, and his faults, make his memoirs immortal among the
unveilings of the spirit. He has studied babies, that he may know his
dark beginnings, and the seeds of grace and of evil. "Then, by degrees,
I began to find where I was; and I had certain desires to declare my will
to those by whom it might be executed. But I could not do it, . . .
therefore would I be tossing my arms, and sending out certain cryes, . . .
and when they obeyed me not . . . I would fall into a rage, and that
not against such as were my subjects or servants, but against my Elders
and my betters, and I would revenge myself upon them by crying." He has
observed that infants "begin to laugh, first sleeping, and then shortly
waking;" a curious note, but he does not ask wherefore the sense of
humour, or the expression of it, comes to children first in their
slumber. Of what do babies dream? And what do the nested swallows
chirrup to each other in their sleep?

"Such have I understood that such infants are as I could know, and such
have I been told that I was by them who brought me up, though even they
may rather be accounted not to know, than to know these things." One
thing he knows, "that even infancy is subject to sin." From the womb we
are touched with evil. "Myselfe have seene and observed some little
child, who could not speake; and yet he was all in an envious kind of
wrath, looking pale with a bitter countenance upon his foster-brother."
In an envious kind of wrath! Is it not the motive of half our politics,
and too much of our criticism? Such is man's inborn nature, not to be
cured by laws or reforms, not to be washed out of his veins, though
"blood be shed like rain, and tears like a mist." For "an infant cannot
endure a companion to feed with him in a fountain of milk which is richly
abounding and overflowing, although that companion be wholly destitute,
and can take no other food but that." This is the Original Sin,
inherited, innate, unacquired; for this are "babes span-long" to suffer,
as the famous or infamous preacher declared. "Where, or at what time,
was I ever innocent?" he cries, and hears no answer from "the dark
backward and abysm" of the pre-natal life.

Then the Saint describes a child's learning to speak; how he amasses
verbal tokens of things, "having tamed, and, as it were, broken my mouth
to the pronouncing of them." "And so I began to launch out more deeply
into the tempes