Chenodia / Or, the Classical Mother Goose

Εὔγαμοι, δείπνῳ ταχέως ἕκαστος
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All Greek text includes a mouse-hover transliteration. Typographical errors are similarly marked . 1806 was Bigelow’s Harvard graduation year.

The work familiarly known as “Mother Goose’s Melodies” has the dignity of being already an undoubted classic among the most incipient cultivators of literature in the United States. It is a compilation taken mostly from “Gammer Gurton’s Garland” or the “Nursery Parnassus,” an English child’s book about a century old, of which various editions have been published in London, Glasgow, and other places. It is stated in one of its late prefaces that it was originally issued at Stockton in a small twopenny brochure, without date, printed by and for R. Christopher. Sir Harris Nicholas says it appeared in the year 1783. The American “Mother Goose” contains many interpolated articles indigenous in the Western hemisphere, which are of various, and some even of doubtful merit.
The Chenodia , now first printed, an experiment for the author’s own amusement, partly in classic verse of various metres, partly in mediæval and unclassic rhyme, and partly, like the original English, in no metre at all, is tendered as an offset for any disparagement of the dead languages contained in two essays read in 1865 and 1866, at a time when classical studies were paramount in Harvard University and other colleges of the United States.
J. B.
Jack Spratt could eat no fat,
His wife could eat no lean,
And so between them both
They licked the platter clean.
Sprattus horrescens adipem recusat,