234 
NATURE NOTES. 
days and times and seasons ; to birds, beasts and fishes ; and indeed to the thousand- 
and-one subjects which come into ordinary conversation and everyday life. Few 
will have suspected that England was so rich in material of this kind, and yet every- 
one who opens the book, even if no student of folk-lore, will come across many 
rhymes and sayings which were familiar to him in his childhood, although since 
then he may never have met with or thought of them. The list of works quoted 
shows the industry which Mr. Northall has devoted to his task ; his mode of citing 
these works has the advantage of brevity, but otherwise is not as convenient as 
it might have been, necessitating as it does constant reference to the explanatory 
list. 
Perhaps to our readers the rhymes and legends connected with animals and 
plants will be among the most interesting. The animal kingdom has furnished 
subjects for a number of traditional verses. Crows, cuckoos, the curlew, the 
owl, the pigeon, the ring-dove, robin and wren, are principal among birds. 
Various superstitions connected with the ash leaf, bay leaf, butterdock, clover, 
evergreen, grass, hemp seed, rosemary and thyme, eggs, apples, water, nuts, the 
cuckoo, garters and stockings, shoes, &c., are of considerable interest. Charms 
and spells for an adder bite, the ague, bleeding, bruises and sprains, cramp, St. 
Vitus's dance, sciatica, tooth-ache, &c. , are probably little known to most of 
those who suffer from these ailments. A work of this kind is of course never 
complete ; but Mr. Northall has certainly brought together a larger collection of 
folk-rhymes than any previous writer. We should have expected to find a 
section devoted to riddles, and one or two publications seem to have been over- 
looked, e.g. , the English Dialect Society’s Dictionary of English Plant-na!?tes, 
in which the author will find several plant-rhymes not included in his collection. 
Here and there we find rhymes included which have hardly the true ring, such 
as that on the mandrake quoted from the Popular Educator, and Mr. Northall is 
a little too prone to regard Dr. Brewer and Mr. Dyer as classical authorities ; 
we doubt, too, whether some of the verses cited from '%\vLXX2.f% Handbooks should be 
considered genuine folk-rhymes. His notes are commendably brief and to the 
point, but we should have been glad of a preface, of which there is not a w'ord, 
and still more so of an index, for which the “ table of contents,” is a very in- 
efficient substitute. 
The student of folk-song will find a treat in the very handsome and singularly 
cheap (6s.) volume of English County Songs (Leadenhall Press), a preliminary 
notice of which was communicated to Nature Notes (p. 55) by one of the 
authors. Miss Lucy Broadwood, who, with Mr. J. A. Fuller Maitland, has brought 
together this most interesting collection. We hope that many a Christmas fire- 
side will be brightened by these sweet and simple strains, associated as they are 
with a suitable piano accompaniment. We have children’s game-songs, like 
“ Green Gravel,” here attributed to Lancashire, but quite as common in Cheshire ; 
songs for certain popular feasts or celebrations, such as the souling song from 
Shropshire, May songs from Hertfordshire and Essex — there is a very pretty 
Cheshire May song which we should like to have seen included ; peace-egging 
songs from Lancashire, and a sword-dance song from Yorkshire ; the traditional 
ballad, typified by the Worcestershire “ Sweet William” and the Staffordshire 
“ Lord Robert ; ” and several versions of well-known folk-songs. Brief but 
interesting notes supply information as to the sources from which the words and 
music are derived, and it is satisfactory to notice how large a number have been 
taken down from the lips of the people. We are glad to find an extremely beauti- 
ful canon, “Now, Robin, lend to me thy Bow,” which is accredited to Rutland- 
shire on what seems to us insufficient evidence. This was popular in the begin- 
ning of Elizabeth’s reign, and Chappell (Popular Music, i., 79) says it was at the 
time of the publication of his book (which is not dated), “still popular in some 
parts of the country,” and was written down for him in Leicestershire. 
Another handsome book, taking us back yet further into the past, is Mr. 
Robert Steele’s Medieval Lore (Elliot Stock, 7s. 6d.), further described in its title 
as “an epitome of the science, geography, animal and plant folk-lore and myth 
of the Middle Age ; being classified gleanings from the Encyclopedia of Bartho- 
lomew Anglicus on the Properties of Things.” Mr. William Morris, in a short 
but admirable preface, justifies after his manner, and with much clearness, the 
period which not so long ago we were wont to call “ the Dark Ages” — a period 
the ignorance of which, as he truly says, “was one of the natural defects of the 
qualities of the learned men and keen critics of the eighteenth and early part of 
