CHILDREN, the plural of CHILD.
Mr Derham computes, that marriages, one with another, produce four children not only in England, but in other parts also.
In the genealogical history of Tuscany, written by Gamarini, mention is made of a nobleman of Siena, named Pichi, who of three wives had 150 children; and that, being sent ambassador to the pope and the emperor, he had 48 of his sons in his retinue. In a monument in the church-yard of St Innocent, at Paris, erected to a woman who died at 88 years of age; it is recorded, that she might have seen 268 children directly issued from her. This exceeds what Hake-well relates of Mrs Honeywood, a gentlewoman of
Kent, born in the year 1527, and married at 16 to her only husband R. Honeywood of Charing, Esq. and died in her 93d year. She had 16 children of her own body; of which three died young, and a fourth had no issue; yet her grandchildren, in the second generation, amounted to 114; in the third, to 228; though in the fourth they fell to 9. The whole number she might have seen in her lifetime, being . So that she could say the same as the distich does of one Dalburgh's family at Basil: