Tea at Trianon: Children's Toys from the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Children's Toys from the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

From Irish Archaeology:

The toys were described as ‘street toys’ and a quick review of the collection certainly brings to mind a hustle and bustle of rowdy out-of-doors play. The broadly contemporary painting The fight between Carnival and Lent by Pieter Brueghel the Elder gives a vivid impression of toys like these being used in a busy Dutch street (see previous image). Additionally, the same artist has left us a fascinatingly insightful inventory of as many as eighty types of games played by contemporary children in Holland his painting Children’s Toys. Interestingly, the church where the toys were found is located right next to a Grammar School which was in existence at the time the toys would have been used. This gives an idea as to the source of toy-owners; but how did the toys come to be blocked up in a disused stairwell? (Read entire article.)