A century of children's books

by Florence V. Barry

Where the sugar’s piled high,

Clambering o’er the lumps so white,

Rocky cliffs of sweet delight”.

There is not enough of this to make a book of children’s poetry. Romance knocked timidly at the gate and tendered a moral as the price of admission; but it would be a dull child that could not find him somewhere in this corner of the garden.

The two small volumes had a short life; some of the pieces were reprinted in collections, but the book failed to hold its own against Mr. Roscoe’s bright fancy, The Butterfly’s Ball[203], written for the birthday of his little boy Robert, and set to music by order of their Majesties for Princess Mary.

Children responded with one accord to the invitation of the first couplet:

“Come take up your Hats, and away let us haste

To the Butterfly’s Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast.”

Here was an entertainment which made no demands on attention or understanding, which had no “moral”; it was all pure enjoyment. The rhymes were as simple as any in Mother Goose’s Melody; the pictures, early efforts of Mulready’s[204], presented the various creatures in glorious independence, no more constrained by laws of proportion than the inhabitants of a willow-pattern landscape. They come, a gay and irresponsible procession, with a hint of fairy-land for all their reality: