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Cornugaya Directory 03
Page 09
The fifth chapel represents the birth of the Virgin. Having
obtained permission to go inside it, I found the date 1715 cut large
and deep on the back of one figure before baking, and I imagine that
this date covers the whole. There is a Queen Anne feeling
throughout the composition, and if we were told that the sculptor
and Francis Bird, sculptor of the statue in front of St. Paul's
Cathedral, had studied under the same master, we could very well
believe it. The apartment in which the Virgin was born is spacious,
and in striking contrast to the one in which she herself gave birth
to the Redeemer. St. Anne occupies the centre of the composition,
in an enormous bed; on her right there is a lady of the George
Cruikshank style of beauty, and on the left an older person. Both
are gesticulating and impressing upon St. Anne the enormous
obligation she has just conferred upon mankind; they seem also to be
imploring her not to overtax her strength, but, strange to say, they
are giving her neither flowers nor anything to eat and drink. I
know no other birth of the Virgin in which St. Anne wants so little
keeping up.
The vast subject which I have thus lightly skimmed is not without
interest, again, from its human implications. Savages as a rule
produce enormous families; but then, the infant mortality in savage
tribes is proportionally great. Among civilized races, families are
smaller, and deaths in infancy are far less numerous. The higher the
class or the natural grade of a stock, the larger as a rule the
proportion of children safely reared to the adult age. The goal
towards which humanity is slowly moving would thus seem to be one
where families in most cases will be relatively small--perhaps not
more on an average than three to a household--but where most or all of
the children brought into the world will be safely reared to full
maturity. This is already becoming the rule in certain favored ranks
of European society.
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