MOTHER GOOSE 



3971 



MOTHER GOOSE 



OTHER GOOSE. Who Mother 

 Goose was, not even the wisest man can say; 

 but what she did for children, the smallest 

 r in the nursery knows. They would miss 

 something, indeed, were they deprived of "Ride 

 a cockhorse," or "This little pig went to mar- 

 ket," or "Hickery-dickery-dock." Where would 

 they get their very first idea of rhythm and 

 rhyme, where find their earliest "pieces" to 

 speak, if Mother Goose had not left them "Lit- 

 tle Boy Blue" and "Little Bo-Peep" and "Jack 

 and Jill?" As nobody can say just who wrote 

 these fascinating jingles, so nobody can explain 

 exactly the charm which they have for children, 

 but every child can feel it. It is different from 

 the feeling roused by any other rhymes, no mat- 

 ter how simple, and almost any grown person 

 who has been fortunate enough to be brought 

 up on Mother Goose Melodies can, by repeat- 

 ing one of them, think himself back to the days 

 in the toy-strewn, fire-lit nursery. 



History. One thing that a child cannot realize 

 is how many thousands, or even millions, of 

 children have smiled and clapped their hands 

 over the merry little verses; not just children 

 rica, but in England as well; while the 

 children in France and in Germany and in Rus- 

 sia have them, too, but in languages which 

 children here could not understand. Nor is it 

 only big brother or father or even grandfather 

 were little who heard the Mother 

 Goose Rhymes; children in England hundreds 

 of years ago, before a white man came to 

 America, knew and loved them, too. Perhaps, 

 wonderful as it may seem, the little Shake- 

 speare heard them, for some of them were cer- 

 his day; perhaps their swin^um 

 music stayed in his head and when he grew up 

 him to cheerful little songs 



arc found here and there in his plays. 



Only in his day they were not printed in t>in 

 books; tl , d at all, or 



Mren learned tin -i 



their 5 .P nt* and passed them on to their own 

 diil. hen, and so the verses lived. Finally it oc- 



curred to someone that they were worth print- 

 ing, and in 1760 they appeared in London in a 

 little book that would seem very unattractive 

 to the children of to-day. Where the title came 

 from no one can be sure, but it was probably 

 taken from the name of Queen Goosefoot, a 

 kindly personage in French legend who had a 

 special fondness for children. More than sixty 

 years before the Mother Goose Melodies ap- 

 peared in London, a Frenchman, Charles Per- 

 rault, had used the name Mother Goose for a 

 book which had in it such delightful stories as 

 Little Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots, Cin- 

 derella, Beauty and the Beast and The Sleeping 

 Beauty. Since the first Mother Goose Melo- 

 dies came out, there have been copies printed 

 too numerous to count ; never a Christmas sea- 

 son draws near without the bookstores placing 

 in their windows new copies, each one more 

 beautiful than the last. 



Mother Goose Up to Date. Once in a while 

 some very careful people declare that there are 

 things in Mother Goo*< which ought to be 

 changed ; and they set at work to change them. 

 A child shouldn't read, they say, of the lady 

 who borrowed Dapple Grey and "whipped him 

 and lashed him and rode him through the 

 mire," so they change it to "she fed him, she 

 petted him, she kept him from the mire." while 

 of "Tom, Tom, the piper's son" who "stole a 

 pig and away he run." they make a gentle boy: 



Tom, Tom, the plper*s son. 



Picked a flower, and away he run ; 



The flower was sweet 



And Tom WUH 



And he went smiling down the street. 



But these changes do not scorn to appeal to 

 average children. They want the fun of the old 



rhymes, even if it is sometimes a littl 



they prefer the squeal of ti -the 



scent of the dainty flower. Probably there can- 

 not be found on record a child whose morals 

 been in any \\ : ly the frolicsome 



Tom or by the delightful Taffy, who "came to 

 use and stole a piece of beef." A.MC c. 



