NURSERY POETRY. 285 



these excellent youths. Parental obedience is one of the cardinal 

 virtues of" little boys and girls." 



The plot now thickens, arid the denouement is at hand. 



" Jack fell down and broke his crown." 



Poor dear boy ! The poet makes no appeal to the feelings of his 

 readers : he does not attempt to awaken their sympathies at the fate 

 of unfortunate Jack : he contents himself with a simple statement 

 of the calamity which befel him. All this is perfectly right on his 

 part. His silence is far more expressive than would have been any 

 thing he could have said. He gives full play to the reader's imagi- 

 nation, and he must be equally destitute both of imagination and 

 feeling who can think of the fate of poor Jack without shedding a 

 tear over it. " Broke his crown !" It is fortunate it was not his 

 neck. His crown possibly might have been mended again, though 

 I fear it never was. But, alas ! no surgery is equal to the task of 

 repairing the injury which a broken neck entails. It is death at 

 once death as certainly as when the neck is stretched by the 

 " finisher of the law." 



But what of Jack's companion ? The reader shall hear : 



" And Gill came tumbling after." 



Moralists say, that calamities do not come singly. How strikingly 

 is the aphorism illustrated in the case of these interesting boys ! 

 Their days are prematurely ended that is to say, if the accident 

 proved fatal at the same time and in the same way. They were, 

 as far as we can judge, strongly attached to each other in life : how 

 truly may it be said of them that in death they were not divided ? 

 How they had lost their equilibrium,, and consequently fallen down 

 the hill, is a matter on which the poet is rnute. Another proof of 

 his skill; for the mind is so absorbed in sorrow at the fate of the 

 boys, as to be incapable of bestowing a single thought on the cause 

 of the fatal accident.* He also, with equal propriety, abstains from 

 saying a word about the pail and the water : a poet of inferior judg- 

 ment would have said something about the pail ; would have told us 

 whether it also fell down the hill, or remained at the top, as if the 

 reader were capable of withdrawing his sympathies for one moment 

 from Jack and Gill, and transferring them to the utensil which they 

 had in their hands when the fatal occurrence took place. 



The author does not say as much, but I do not think any of my 

 readers will differ in opinion from me when I mention that I pre- 

 sume the boys were brothers. In that case, the circumstances con- 

 nected with their untimely death could only be second in their af- 

 fecting interest to those under which the "Babes in the Wood" 

 perished. I will not refer to what must have been the feelings of 



* It is right to mention that I put the fatality of the accident hypothetically. 

 The poet is silent as to that point. Perhaps after all the little darlings re* 

 covered from the effects of their fall, though I have assumed they did not, 



M. M. No. 9. 2O 



