Nursery rhyme

“ The nursery rhyme is the novel and light reading of the infant scholar. It occupies, with respect to the A B C, the position of a romance which relieves the mind from the cares of a riper age. The absurdity and frivolity of a rhyme may naturally be its chief attractions to the very young; and there will be something lost from the imagination of that child, whose parents insist so much on matters of fact, that the "cow" must be made, in compliance with the rules of their educational code, to jump "under" instead of "over the moon;" ”

“ The magical papyri of ancient Egypt are full of them. In our own rhyme, "Hiccup," regarded as a personal kind of fiend ("Animism") , is charmed away by a promise of a butter-cake. There is a collection of such things in Reginald Scot's "Discovery of Witchcraft." Thus our old nursery rhymes are smooth stones from the brook of time, worn round by constant friction of tongues long silent. We cannot hope to make new nursery rhymes, any more than we can write new fairy tales. ”

“ A GARDEN ROMANCE. This is a dainty little song telling of the romance and wedding of Marigold and Sweet William. It is just the song for dainty little girls to sing.
COME TO THE NURSERY RHYME GARDEN AND PLAY. Here is something different for the little folks to sing. The Nursery Rhyme Folk are so familiar to children, it will be no trick for them to remember the words. The music has a most captivating swing. ”

“ There are very few children who do not know the funny old nursery rhyme of “Tic-tac-too;” it is an old-fashioned rhyme, and in great vogue amongst nurses. Of course Alec enjoyed it, and liked to have his toes pulled, and the queer words said to him. But that is not the story; for it is one thing to like a nursery rhyme very much, and another to be called by the name of that rhyme, and nothing else. ”

“ It may be argued that any attempt at classification of material so freely and variously used as the Mother Goose rhymes is sure to stiffen the work of the class and render it less enjoyable. Spontaneity is more vital here than at any other stage of one's literary education.
What is the secret of the nursery rhyme's appeal to children? Here at least we are face to face with what may be called a final fact, that these jingles do make an appeal so universal and remarkable that any attempt to explain it seems always to fall far short of completeness. ”

“ Indeed, the scraps of magical versified spells in Märchen are entirely of the character of nursery rhymes, and are of dateless antiquity. The rhyme of "Dr. Faustus" may be nearly as old as the mediæval legend dramatised by Marlowe. The Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists put nursery rhymes in the mouths of characters; a few jingles creep into the Miscellanies, such as "The Pills to purge Melancholy." Among these (1719) is "Tom the piper's son," who played "Over the hills and far away," a song often adapted to Jacobite uses. ”

“ A chorus of voices takes up the tune and the solo is repeated, after which the alphabet is sung through, and the last letter, Z, sustained and repeated again and again, to bother the next child whose turn it now is [86] to sing the next solo. The new solo must be a nursery rhyme not hitherto sung by any of the company. If unable to supply a fresh rhyme the child stands out of the game and pays forfeit.
"I APPRENTICE MY SON."
In another parlour game of a rather interesting kind the youngest in the room begins by saying—
"I apprentice my son to a butcher ”

“ CHAPTER XV. BELL RHYMES. The jingle of the bells in nursery poetry is certainly the prettiest of all the features in the poetical fictions of Baby-land.
The oft-repeated rhyme of—
"Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross, [K]
To see a fair [L] lady upon a white horse;
Bells [M] on her fingers and bells on her toes,
She will have music wherever she goes,"
has a charm with every child. ”

“ Perhaps, therefore, while not grudging folklorists their perquisitions in this delightful region, and while acknowledging that there are many interesting things to be found out by them in it, we may be permitted to look at nursery rhymes from a rather different point of view. ”

“ The reverence felt for the wren is equalled among ourselves by the reverence felt for the robin, whose knell remains one of our finest, and perhaps one of our oldest nursery pieces. It is set in dialogue form, which seems to have been generally associated with bells, but which was a primitive [Pg 219] manner of recitation, as we gather from other pieces.
The information which can be derived from nursery rhymes corroborates what has been collected elsewhere concerning different stages of social history in the heathen past. ”

“ THE origin of the right nursery rhymes is, of course, popular, like the origin of ballads, tales (Märchen) , riddles, proverbs, and, indeed, of literature in general. They are probably, in England, of no great antiquity, except in certain cases, where they supply the words to some child's ballet, some dance game. A game may be of prehistoric antiquity, as appears in the rudimentary forms of backgammon, Pachin and Patullo, common to Asia, and to the Aztecs, as Dr. ”

“ The chafer was associated with the sun in Egypt, the broken egg engaged the attention of the thinking in Tibet.
Thus the comparative study of the nursery rhymes [Pg 220] of different countries throws light on allusions which otherwise remain obscure, and opens up a new vista of research. The evidence which is here deduced from some rhymes, and the interpretation put on others, may be called into question. Much remains to be said on the subject. But the reader will, I think, agree that nursery rhymes preserve much that is meaningful in itself, and worth the attention of the student. ”

“ It may be perfectly true that most of the things indicated in these class-names supplied, in this case and that, basis for the jingle, starting-points, texts, and so [Pg viii] forth. But all genuine nursery rhymes (even in fragments such as "Martin Swart and his men, Sodledum [saddle them] , sodledum," if it is genuine, and others where definite history comes in) have never become nursery rhymes until the historical fact has been practically forgotten by those who used them, and nothing but the metrical and musical attraction remains. ”

“ The Nursery Rhymes When a child is taught the little nursery rhymes which to us may seem to be meaningless jingles, he is really peeping into the fields of literature, taking the first steps in those journeys that will end in Shakespeare, Browning and Goethe. When his infantile ear is caught by the lively rhythm and the catchy rhymes, he is receiving his first lessons in poetry. That the lessons are delightful now he shows by his smiles, and in middle life he will appreciate the joy more keenly as he teaches the same little rhymes to his own children. ”

“ There are, it seems, historical nursery rhymes, literal nursery rhymes; nursery rhymes narrative, proverbial, scholastic, lyrical, riddlesome; [Pg vii] rhymes dealing with charms, with gaffers and gammers, with games, with paradoxes, with lullabies, with jingles, with love and matrimony, with natural (I wish he had called it unnatural) history, with accumulative stories, with localities, with relics. ”

“ Some nursery rhymes have a definite object aimed at,—that of practising a child's memory, or of teaching it the letters of the alphabet, or the numbers of a clock face, or the ordinary numerals. In Jewish books of prayer for the Paschal Festival, two nursery rhymes are almost always inserted, wherewith the tedium of the service may be lightened to the children. One of these is very similar to our English, 'Sing a song of One, O!' It begins thus:—
Who is one, and who can declare it? I will teach you it; One is God in Heaven and on earth. ”

“ The Tzigane of Hungary to-day wears his sheep-skin breeches, and hands them down to posterity, with a plentiful supply of quick-silver and grease to keep them soft and clean. "Bye baby bunting" and the little [110] "hare skin" is the other nursery rhyme having a reference to skins of animals being used for clothing. But "Baby bunting" has no purpose to point to, unless indeed the habits of the Esquimaux are taken in account. In the list of nursery songs sung by children in Elizabeth's reign, the following extract from "The longer thou livest the more foole thou art" gives four ”

“ Some pieces preserve allusions which carry us back to customs that prevailed during the so-called mother age; others, quite distinct from them, are based on conceptions that may have taken rise before man tilled the soil. The spread of European nursery rhymes, taken in the bulk, appears to be independent of the usual racial divisions. Some of our rhymes, such as that of the ladybird and Humpty Dumpty have their closest parallels in Germany and Scandinavia; others, such as the bird-chants and the animal weddings, have corresponding versions in France and in Spain. ”

“ Children love the nursery rhymes largely because they have heard them and have caught the sound and rhythm more than the meaning. It is the lively music more than the whimsical meaning that has made the rhymes popular. When the time comes that children begin to lose their interest and consider poetry beneath them, their flagging attention often may be aroused and new interest created by simply reading new selections aloud to them and talking with them about the meaning and beauties of the poems. ”

“ For the teacher who hesitates about the advisability of using the Mother Goose melodies, it may be well to state their claim by a quotation from Charles Welsh in his modest but most excellent collection called "A Book of Nursery Rhymes": "The direct simplicity, dramatic imagination, and spontaneous humour of the nursery rhymes of Mother Goose will probably never be excelled by any modern verse. ”

“ In the beginning of the first volume are the nursery rhymes which children have enjoyed for ages, which are read, or far better told, to infants who rejoice in the pictures. Between the nursery rhymes and the literature that follows is quite a gap, intentionally left by the editor. There are no pretty little tales in words of one syllable for beginners to read, but there are good fables and stories to be told while the children are learning to read, and later, to be read by the young people themselves. No parent can go astray in selection if he knows his own children. ”

“ The older variety of mystical and moral interpretation having gone out of fashion before they had emerged from the contempt of the learned, it has not been much applied to them, though the temptation is great, for, as King Charles observes in "Woodstock," most things in the world remind one of the tales of Mother Goose.
But the most special attentions that nursery rhymes have received have, perhaps, taken the form of the elaborate and ingenious divisions attempted by Halliwell and others. ”

“ The sorting of nursery rhymes according to the number of their foreign parallels, yields an additional criterion as to the relative antiquity of certain rhymes. For those rhymes that embody the more primitive conceptions are those that are spread over the wider geographical area. The above inquiry has shown that pieces such as Mother Hubbard and Three Blind Mice are relatively new, and that all the rhymes formed on the model of Little Miss Muffet go back to the Cushion Dance and to the game of Sally Waters. ”

“ The simplest of the nursery rhymes, as may be seen by the comments and explanations given in another part of this volume, are full of interest to high school boys and girls, and in not a few schools form the basis of many serious lessons. The fables, the myths and the literature of the legendary heroes are not only interesting, but are of sufficient breadth [426] in meaning to justify hard work on the part of anyone who has not already mastered them. It is a mistake to think that the simple things do not interest young men and young women. ”

“ Turning to the nursery rhymes of our own country, it will tend materially to strengthen the results to which we have arrived, if we succeed in proving their antiquity in this island. We shall be enabled to do so satisfactorily, and to show that they are not the modern nonsense some folks may pronounce them to be. They illustrate the history and manners of the people for centuries. ”

“ The name also appears in connection with nursery rhymes in a little toy-book, issued by Lumsden in Glasgow, which is called Gammer Gurton's Garland of Nursery Songs, and Toby Tickle's Collection of Riddles. This is undated. It occurs also in an insignificant little toy-book called The Topbook of all, in connection with Nurse Lovechild, Jacky Nory, and Tommy Thumb. This book is also undated, but contains the picture of a shilling of 1760 which is referred to as "a new shilling."
The date at which nursery rhymes appeared in print [Pg 7] yields one clue to their currency at a given period. ”

“ MANY true nursery rhymes go back to traditional dancing and singing games which are now relegated to the playground, but which were danced by rustics within the memory of man, and which are heirs to the choral dances of our heathen forefathers. For dancing in its origin was no idle and unmeaning pastime. Dances were undertaken for serious purposes, such as warding off evil and promoting agricultural growth, conceptions which hang closely together. ”

“ For many interesting facts and suggestions on rhythm in nursery rhymes consult Charles H. Sears, "Studies in Rhythm," Pedagogical Seminary, Vol. VIII, p. 3. For the whole subject of folk songs look into Martinengo-Cesaresco, The Study of Folk Songs. Books and periodicals dealing with primary education often contain brief discussions of value on the use of rhymes. Many Mother Goose records have been prepared by the educational departments of the various talking-machine companies, and may be used to advantage in the work in rhythm. ”