Grocott & Ward, comps. Grocott’s Familiar Quotations, 6th ed. 189-?.
Children
Unruly children make their sire stoop.
Shakespeare.—King Richard II., Act III. Scene 4. (The Gardener to his Assistants.)
The pleasure that some fathers feed upon
Is my strict fast,—I mean my children’s looks.
Shakespeare.—King Richard II., Act II. Scene 1. (Old Gaunt to Richard.)
As children gathering pebbles on the shore.
Milton.—Paradise Regained, Book IV.
[“A remarkable anticipation,” says the Rev. Geo. Gilfillan, “of Newton’s famous saying, ‘I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.’”—Newton’s Life.]
Newton, (that proverb of the mind,) alas!
Declared, with all his grand discoveries recent,
That he himself felt only “like a youth
Picking up shells by the great ocean—Truth.”
Byron.—Don Juan, Canto VII. Verse 5, Line 5.
When I look on my boys
They renew all my joys,
Myself in my children I see;
While the comforts I find
In the kingdom my mind,
Pronounce that my kingdom is free.
Lloyd.—Song in the Capricious Lovers, Air 2.
By sports like these are all their cares beguil’d;
The sports of children satisfy the child.
Goldsmith.—The Traveller.
A little bench of heedless bishops here,
And there a chancellor in embryo.
Shenstone.—The Schoolmistress, Stanza 28.