Nor would the boy give up his faith with its tremor and private laughter.  Because a child has a place for everything, this boy had placed the monstrous man in the ceiling, in a corner of the room that might be kept out of sight by the bed curtain.  If that corner were left uncovered, the fear would grow stronger than the fun; “the man would see me,” said the little boy.  But let the curtain be in position, and the child lay alone, hugging the dear belief that the monster was near.

He was earnest in controversy with his mother as to the existence of his man.  The man was there, for he had been told so, and he was there to wait for “naughty boys,” said the child, with cheerful self-condemnation.  The little boy’s voice was somewhat hushed, because of the four ears of the listener, but it did not falter, except when his mother’s arguments against the existence of the man seemed to him cogent and likely to gain the day.  Then for the first time the boy was a little downcast, and the light of mystery became dimmer in his gay eyes.

CHILDREN IN BURLESQUE

Derision, which is so great a part of human comedy, has not spared the humours of children.  Yet they are fitter subjects for any other kind of jesting.  In the first place they are quite defenceless, but besides and before this, it might have been supposed that nothing in a child could provoke the equal passion of scorn.  Between confessed unequals scorn is not even suggested.  Its derisive proclamation of inequality has no sting and no meaning where inequality is natural and manifest.

Children rouse the laughter of men and women; but in all that laughter the tone of derision is more strange a discord than the tone of anger would be, or the tone of theological anger and menace.  These, little children have had to bear in their day, but in the grim and serious moods—­not in the play—­of their elders.  The wonder is that children should ever have been burlesqued, or held to be fit subjects for irony.

Whether the thing has been done anywhere out of England, in any form, might be a point for enquiry.  It would seem, at a glance, that English art and literature are quite alone in this incredible manner of sport.

And even here, too, the thing that is laughed at in a child is probably always a mere reflection of the parents’ vulgarity.  None the less it is an unintelligible thing that even the rankest vulgarity of father or mother should be resented, in the child, with the implacable resentment of derision.

John Leech used the caricature of a baby for the purposes of a scorn that was not angry, but familiar.  It is true that the poor child had first been burlesqued by the unchildish aspect imposed upon him by his dress, which presented him, without the beauties of art or nature, to all the unnatural ironies.  Leech did but finish him in the same spirit, with dots for the childish eyes, and a certain form of face which is best described as a fat square containing two circles—­the inordinate cheeks of that ignominious baby.  That is the child as Punch in Leech’s day preserved him, the latest figure of the then prevailing domestic raillery of the domestic.