National Rhymes of the Nursery
"Ride a cock horse."—Page 70.
National Rhymes of the Nursery
With Introduction By
George Saintsbury
And Drawings By
Gordon Browne
London
Wells, Gardner, Darton & Co.
Paternoster Buildings, E.c.
INTRODUCTION
It is a good many years since Peacock, in one of those curiouslyill-tempered and not particularly happy attacks on the Lake poets, withwhich he chose to diversify his earlier novels, conceived, as anornament of "Mainchance Villa," a grand allegorical picture, depictingthe most famous characters of English Nursery Tales, Rhymes,&c.—Margery Daw, Jack and Jill, the other Jack who built the House, thechief figures of "that sublime strain of immortal genius" calledDickory Dock, and the third Jack, Horner, eating a symbolic Christmaspie. At the date of Melincourt, in which this occurs, its even thenadmirable author was apt to shoot his arrows rather at a venture; and itmay be hoped, without too much rashness, that he did not mean to speakdisrespectfully of the "sublime strain of immortal genius" itself, butonly of what he thought Wordsworth's corrupt following of that andsimilar things.
Nevertheless, if he had lived a little longer, or if (for he lived quitelong enough) he had been in the mind for such game, he might have foundfresh varieties of it in certain more modern handlings of the same[Pg vi]subject. Since the Brothers Grimm founded modern folklore, it hasrequired considerable courage to approach nursery songs and nurserytales in any but a spirit of the severest "scientism," which I presumeto be the proper form for the method of those who call themselves"scientists." We have not only had investigations—some of them by nomeans unfruitful or uninteresting investigations—into certain thingswhich are, or may be, the originals of these artless compositions inhistory or in popular manners. We have not only had some of their queerverbal jingles twisted back again into what may have been an articulateand authentic meaning. I do not know that many of them have been madeout to be sun-myths; but that yesterday popular, to-day ratherdiscredited, system of exposition is very evidently as applicable tothem as to anything else. The older variety of mystical and moralinterpretation having gone out of fashion before they had emerged fromthe 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 MotherGoose.
But the most special attentions that nursery rhymes have received have,perhaps, taken the form of the elaborate and ingenious divisionsat