Page:A short history of social life in England.djvu/219

"women and maids that attended him and covered him too hot with blankets as he lay in a cradle, near an excessive hot fire in a close room." Children were unsuitably fed and unsuitably dressed. They were little miniatures of their parents, and must have suffered much in the big ruffs and padded breeches of the period. A great deal was expected of them. We hear of a child of three years old being complained of for being "shy and rustic" by his father, till even his stern old grandmother is obliged to intercede for him. "Sonn," she writes, "Edmund must be woone with fiar menes. Let me begge of you and his mother that nobody whip him, but Mr. Parrye; yf you doe goe a violent waye with him, you will be the furst that will rue it, for i veryly beleve he will reseve ingery by it." There was little happy childhood for the children of these days. Lucy Hutchinson has told us that at four years old she could read English perfectly, and was "carried to sermons," which she could afterwards repeat word for word, while at the age of seven she was receiving instruction from no less than eight tutors. But even this pales before the knowledge of poor little Richard Evelyn, a