[ Sala / "Little Children" ]
George Augustus Sala (1828 - 1895) was an English journalist, painter, and engraver — and a frequent contributor to his friend Charles Dickens' weekly literary and cultural magazine Household Words.
This brief essay, which appeared in that very magazine for November 26, 1853, is a consideration of innate morality in children. At at one point Sala remarks on the natural "charity" of children, which he believes extends not just to other children but to animals:
I must own, too, that their charity does not stop at humanity but extends itself to the animal creation. I never saw a child feed a donkey with macaroons; but I have seen one little girl press pound-cake upon a Shetland poney, and another little girl give half of her cake to a four-footed acquaintance of the Newfoundland breed. (VIII: 292)