It is too late: the life of all his blood / Is touch’d corruptibly and his pure brain, / Which some suppose the soul’s frail dwelling-house, / Doth by the idle comments that it makes / Foretell the ending of mortality.

Your eight to twelve year old is in the gray area between early childhood and the teen years. He is a child in the middle—a “tweenager.”

There were sneers, and scoffs, and inuendoes of some; prophecies of failure in a hundred ways; forecastings of non-completion, forecastings of swift dissolution and crashing ruin […]

By which account, a Diamond steeped in Goat's bloud, rather increaseth in hardness, then acquireth any softness by the infusion; for the best we have are comminuible without it; and are so far from breaking hammers, that they submit unto pistillation, and resist not an ordinary pestle.