Then stooping to drink, with a complaisant bow,
‘Ma’am, your health,’ said the ass:—‘Thank you, Sir,’ said the cow.”
Thus laughter crept into the garden under the eye of Caution and Example, and, for his coaxing ways, was allowed to stay as a probationer.
Charles and Mary Lamb wrote their Poetry for Children[196] as a task. It was probably suggested by Mrs. Godwin, anxious to rival the publishers of Original Poems. In a letter to Coleridge (June, 1809), Lamb says: “Our little poems are but humble, but they have no name. You must read them, remembering they were task-work; and perhaps you will admire the number of subjects, all of children, picked out by an old Batchelor and an old Maid. Many parents would not have found so many.”
The Lambs could do nothing together without enjoying it; they could not speak in a child’s voice, and had almost forgotten the way to Babylon, but there are fewer subtleties of child-thought here than in Mrs. Leicester’s School. The verses are full of practical interests. The humour of the writers brought tenderness and delight to the “task”, and children, who are quick to catch the note of sympathy, would feel this without understanding it.
Lamb had already tried his hand at children’s rhymes. In 1805 he had written The King and Queen of Hearts[197], a careless and farcical impromptu which he sent by carrier to “Mr. Johnny Wordsworth”, begging his “acceptance and opinion”.
It is not easy to decide his exact share in Poetry for Children. The pieces reprinted in 1818[198] are not children’s poems. One of them, “To a River in which a Child was drowned”, was suggested by the translation of a Spanish ballad in Percy’s Reliques. “Love, Death and Reputation” was recognised by Swinburne as a translation from Webster’s Duchess of Malfi.
Lamb seems to have amused himself now and then by casting fragments of mature flavour into this jar of nursery simples.
Of children, but assuredly not for them is the beautiful “Parental Recollections” which suggests understanding as well as love: