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NURSERY POETRY. 



MEN'S tastes are proverbially various. Mine, on the subject of 

 poetry, will, I know, be considered singular. I cannot help that. 

 We have no more control over our tastes than we have, to use Lord 

 Brougham's words, " over the colour of our skin or the height of 

 our stature." I hold that the most erroneous notions obtain in the 

 world respecting what constitutes true poetry. It were no difficult 

 task to establish the position. It is admitted, on all hands, that that 

 is the best poetry which finds its way most directly to the feelings, 

 and which leaves the most lasting impression on the mind. Whence 

 comes it then, I ask, that Nursery Poetry is so lightly esteemed, while 

 such works as Homer's Iliad, Virgil's ^Eneid, and Milton's Paradise 

 Lost are so generally admired and praised ? Tried by the above 

 unerring test, the latter works will not bear a moment's comparison 

 with much of the poetry of the nursery ; for though we may have 

 read Homer, Virgil, Milton, and all the other writers of versifica- 

 tion, erroneously called poets, so late perhaps as yesterday, we do 

 not recollect, it may be, a single passage in their writings, while we 

 have a distinct remembrance, not of a detached couplet or two, but 

 of the entire pieces which constitute the staple of nursery poetical 

 reading, though a full half century may have elapsed since we 

 handled any of the Lilliputian halfpenny volumes in which such 

 pieces have appeared. Could there, then, I ask, be a greater proof 

 of the impression which the latter class of poetry makes on the mind 

 of the reader ? And of the little, or rather, if the phrase be not 

 unclassical, no impression produced by the former. 



My position being thus demonstrably established, the readers of 

 The Monthly Magazine will pardon me the expression of my sur- 

 prise and regret, that the public taste should be so grievously vitiated 

 as to prefer the poetical works of the three personages whose names 

 I have mentioned, and of others which might have been added, to the 

 infinitely higher order of poetry which abounds in the nursery. 



This anomalous and discreditable state of things shall no longer 

 exist if I can help it. I have determined to come forward, as no 

 other person better qualified for the task seems disposed to under- 

 take it as the champion of those great poetic geniuses who reign 

 paramount in the nursery, though so shamefully neglected by 

 " children of a larger growth." This is an undertaking far more 

 noble than any recorded in the page of modern history. There is 

 nothing so truly worthy in the voluminous annals of chivalry. Were 

 it not that the one related to a future world, and was immediately 

 connected with man's religious interests, and that the other has refe- 

 rence to intellectual merit alone, I would not shrink from comparing 

 the nobleness of the task I have undertaken with that of the Cru- 



