The first of his popular essays in amusement, the one by which—owing to an accident of music—he is still best known, though anonymously, to a large public, is The Bad Child's Book of Beasts. Successors in a similar manner are More Beasts for Worse Children (delightful title), A Moral Alphabet, and Cautionary Tales for Children. These are successful books for children, of a great popularity, and may be read with considerable pleasure by elder persons.
To define the particular quality which makes them good is more than a little difficult. It is much easier to analyse and expose the virtues of the most affecting poetry than to explain what moves us in the mildest piece of humour. This is amply proved by the fact that innumerable volumes exist on the origin of comedy and the cause of laughter, and there are more to come: while, roughly speaking, even philosophers are agreed as to the manner in which serious poetry touches us.
A great deal, too, of the appeal of these pieces is due to the illustrations of B. T. B. which complement the text with an apt and grotesque commentary. The pleasure given by the verse, perhaps, if one may handle so delicate and trifling a thing, lies in a sort of inconsequence and unexpectedness. Witness the poem on the Yak:
Then tell your Papa where the Yak can be got,
And if he is awfully rich
He will buy you the creature—
(The reader now turns over the page.)
Or else
he will not.
(I cannot be positive which.)
Or it may reside in mere genial idiocy, as in The Dodo:
The Dodo used to walk around
And take the sun and air.
The Sun yet warms his native ground—
The Dodo is not there!
The voice which used to squawk and squeak
Is now for ever dumb—
Yet may you see his bones and beak
All in the Mu-se-um.
This is the quality which chiefly inspires the Cautionary Tales, that admirable series of biographies. "Matilda, Who told Lies and was Burned to Death" is perhaps too well known to quote, but we may extract a passage from "Lord Lundy, who was too Freely Moved to Tears, and thereby ruined his Political Career":