“The Royal Institution
Gives knowledge, taste and skill,
And change without confusion
Attends its lectures still.
“Some folks have wished to be
Whole years in the Museum:
So much there is to see,
No fear it should ennui ’em.”
The unconscious humorist rambles thus through a dozen stanzas. But the last lines are drowned by the voice of the Pedlar at the door. He is singing new rhymes to old tunes: Whimsical Incidents, Cinderella in Verse, Mother Hubbard, Dame Trot and Goody Flitch.[209] The Lady of Ninety who wrote Dame Wiggins of Lee[210] must have heard him singing in her youth.
Nonsense rhymers, whipped out of the Court of Stupidity, found a refuge in the purlieus of the child’s garden; nobody recognised them as descendants of the citizens of Cockayne, or suspected that they would one day be honoured as predecessors of Edward Lear. Yet who shall gauge their influence on the character of Englishmen, or decide how far the eccentricities of certain theorists depended on the exclusion of nonsense from the nursery?