Small creatures that creep among grass-blades seem to have furnished the rhymer with analogies. Tom’s house is but half a mile from the court, yet he takes two days and nights to make the journey; he sleeps in a walnut-shell, and his parents feast him three days upon a hazel-nut,
“that was sufficient for a month
For this great man to eat”.
“A few moist April drops” are enough to delay his return, till his “careful father” takes a “birding trunk” and with a single blast, blows him back to court.
Last comes the notable account of his death, which tells how the doctors examined him through “a fine perspective glass” and found—
“His face no bigger than an ant’s,
Which hardly could be seen”.
The rhyme is a dwarf epic, perhaps begun by some child that had found an ant-hill, or a thistle taller than himself; carried on, with a phrase here and a picture there from older tales, by the “careful father”, who set it to the unequal beat of little feet at his side.
But no child could endure the unhappy end. A second part and a third (both sorry imitations of the first) brought the “little knight” back to fresh adventures; and even the printers of instructive books understood the value of his name on a title-page.
Catskin,[22] long forgotten through the more glorious transformations of her French sister, could hold Dr. Primrose’s children with the old theme of disguise and changing fortune. Five parts in verse gave her whole history: how she was banished, like Cordelia, by an angry father; how she disguised herself in a hood of Catskin, and took service in a great house; how (following here the very print of the Glass Slipper) she went to the ball and danced with a Knight; and how, one day when she forgot her Catskin hood, the Knight, discovering her “in rich attire”, fell in love with her and married her.