Children’s Play, Through the Ages, Shows Human History in Miniature : Toys: The playthings of youth both mirror and influence personality. Some who became famous adults never got tired of make-believe.

On Christmas morning, in front of the marble fireplace in the nursery at Blenheim Palace, 6-year-old Winston Churchill deployed his regiments across the carpet and set up ambushes behind the chair legs, pretending to whip the French again at Blenheim as did his famous ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough.

Amused at the child’s concentration, his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, asked him if he would like someday to go into the army.

“I thought it would be splendid to command an army, so I answered YES at once,” Churchill later wrote in his memoirs. “The toy soldiers turned the current of my life.”

Wilbur and Orville Wright were in grade school in Dayton, Ohio, when an uncle brought them a Christmas gift from Paris: a flying mechanical toy by Penaud, the famous French toy maker. After school, the brothers began selling toys of their own invention to earn pocket money to buy the science books that would one day lead to flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C.

Young Frank Lloyd Wright erected his first building with Froebel blocks, introduced by the German educator Friedrich Froebel, who devised the kindergarten system of learning through play.

The dream world of toys is the serious business of childhood.

And, fortunately for today’s multibillion-dollar toy industry, many adults throughout history never put away childish things.

English Colonists arriving at Roanoke Island in 1585 greeted the Indians with gifts of knives, glass marbles and dolls. William Penn, when he came to Philadelphia in 1699, brought with him “Letitia,” a doll gorgeously gowned in velvet and brocade.

Paul Revere, who was a toy maker as well as a silversmith, made drums from nail kegs and baby rattles from gourds. In addition to playing with kites, Benjamin Franklin had a profitable sideline turning out “educational playing cards” in his Philadelphia print shop.

French novelist George Sand presented 120 plays and designed all the costumes for her puppet theater at Chateau Nohant. Joseph Haydn composed operas for Prince Nicholas Esterhazy’s toy theater. Johann Goethe, the German poet and playwright, made all the scenery for the puppet theater he gave to his son, August, for Christmas in 1800. English cabinetmakers Thomas Chippendale and Thomas Sheraton fashioned elegant doll furniture.

It is not surprising that those who live by their imaginations cling more steadfastly than others to the fantasies of childhood. Cervantes, Anatole France, G. K. Chesterton and Robert Louis Stevenson were avid toy collectors. Lewis Carroll was a steady customer at Creamer’s toy shop on London’s Regent Street.

Toys are as old as civilization--older, if you can envision a brontosaurus pup playing with a stone as a kitten worries a ball of yarn. Anthropologists assure us that cavemen played marbles-type games with nuts and dry berries.

Egyptians who died as children were entombed with their beloved toys. The dolls of early Christians who died young were buried with them in the catacombs.

The Chinese had kites from the 3rd Century BC. In 206 BC, Gen. Han-sin sent up a kite to gauge the distance between his camp and the palace of Emperor Wel-Yang Kong.

American clipper ships brought home from China some sensational “new” toys that were already centuries old: the yo-yo, the merry-go-round and a weighted doll that was impossible to tip over, named “Daruma” for the monk who introduced Buddhism to China and whose legs were said to have withered away during nine years of contemplation.

From the Middle Ages down to the present German toy makers in Nuremberg, Oberammergau, Berchtesgarden and Sonneberg excelled in imagination, craftsmanship and merchandising skills. Peddlers with sacks on their backs carried toys along the medieval trade routes of Europe, down the Brenner Pass into Italy. Some were women, called “notion nannies,” who offered toys along with their regular wares of pots, pans and thread.

The French were famous for wind-up toys. One French doll could “write perfect penmanship.” Another played a melody on the harmonium, nodding her head as her fingers flitted over the keys, then stood up to take a bow. Marquis de Vauban, the French military engineer, devised for the Nuremberg toy makers an army that could march, shoot, reload and even retreat--all made of sterling silver.

Marie Antoinette, who loved and collected toys all her life, was shown a doll in an artist’s smock by Henri Jaquez Druz, whose mechanical marvels delighted the Spanish royal family and who just missed being condemned as diabolical and burned at the stake during the Inquisition. The artist doll proceeded to sketch a credible likeness of the French queen as she sat for her portrait.

Alas, Marie Antoinette little realized then that her fate and that of her husband, Louis XVI, would create a demand for toy guillotines. Goethe asked a friend to bring him one from Paris.

Grim toys are as enduringly popular as fairy tales. Children in ages past played with live birds on strings, kept crickets in cages and trained mice to pull wagons. Puppet shows made ogres of dwarfs, hunchbacks and cripples. Toy catalogues before World War I featured a music-box Titantic that played “Nearer My God to Thee” as it sank in the bathtub.

“Teen-age Mutant Ninja Turtles” swords and nunchakus, a multimillion-dollar hit in this year’s toy market after the success of the movie, have been blamed for rising playground violence in Australia and are banned from many classrooms.

Clay horses and wooden knights fueled the fervor of the 30,000 boys and girls who followed Stephen, the French shepherd boy, on the Children’s Crusade in 1212. Many lost their lives in that deadly game of trying to free the Holy Land from the infidel.

War toys were part of the education of a prince. Charles V of France, also known as Charles the Mad, received a toy cannon for Christmas in 1383. Emperor Maximilian of the Holy Roman Empire ordered toy knights that could be dislodged from their horses for his 10-year-old son, Ludwig. Six years later the lad was unhorsed and killed fighting the Turks. The future Louis XIV received for Christmas two sterling silver armies, each with a troop strength of 30 regiments of cavalry and infantry.

Then, as now, toy soldiers went to war with the most modern weapons. This year, G.I. Joe is mounted on the “Hum-Vee,” the new Army “jeep” widely deployed with Operation Desert Shield in the Persian Gulf.

We think of Toyland as a fantasy world, but the most successful playthings always reproduced reality as the child knew it. Down through the centuries, chariots and archers, the stag hunt and farm and forest scenes gave way to royal carriages, cowboys and Indians, horse-drawn trolleys, Model T Fords, dump trucks, highway trailers, jet planes, rockets and space shuttles--and now, a laptop computer just like Dad’s or Mom’s.

Toy makers always keep up with the times. A political cartoon poking fun at Theodore Roosevelt for sparing the life of a bear cub while on a hunting expedition inspired the Ideal Toy Co. to ask permission to name a stuffed toy for him. “I don’t think my name is worth much to the toy bear cub business, but you are welcome to use it,” the President answered. He underestimated the timeless appeal of the teddy bear.

Along with the merry melody of the cash box, the dream world of toys has inspired countless poems, paintings, operas, ballets, plays, movies and pop songs. Robert Louis Stevenson’s nostalgic evocation of his own sickly childhood is among the nicest:

‘And sometimes for an hour or so

I watch my leaden soldiers go

With different uniforms and drills

Among the bedclothes through the hills.