A century of children's books

by Florence V. Barry

A boy’s kite carries this quaint versifier for a moment into the upper air. Even there his fancy cannot support itself; he snatches a simile for the sake of the rhyme, then takes a header to earth and fastens on his moral:

“He that soars a Pitch too high,

Riding on Ambition’s Wings:

Sudden in the Dirt may lie;

Pride its Shadow ever brings.”

But the Kite actually rises, waving a “knotty Tail,” seeming now “a little Cloud,” now “no bigger than a Spoon”; the birds play round her or mistake her for a hawk, and the boy, were his string long enough, “would send her to the Moon.”

The rhymes of Mother Goose’s Melody and The Top Book of All were wild flowers that sowed themselves in the midst of herbaceous borders. Two garlands of folk-songs for children grew out of the same soil. The date of Gammer Gurton’s Garland is unknown.[181] A Bodleian copy in flowered covers has some rhymes from Mother Goose; but the most daring “Lulliputian” would not have chosen the fairy theme of impossible tasks:

“Can you make me a cambrick shirt,

Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme: