“Here lie the Remains of the Duchess of Downright:
Who, when a Maid, was no other
than Sarah Jones
A poor Farmer’s Daughter.
From her Attachment to Goodness she
became great.
Her Virtue raised her from a mean State
To a high Degree of Honour
and
Her Innocence procured her Peace in her last Moments.
She smiled even in Agony
And embraced Death as a friendly Pilot
Who was to steer her
To a more exalted State of Bliss.”
Here the author, as if doubting his effect, adds a direct appeal:
“Little Reader,
Whoever thou art, observe these her Rules
And become thyself
A Copy of this bright Example.”
It was somewhere between 1760 and 1765, when a latent spirit of romance was beginning to move the grown-up world, that the children’s bookseller turned his attention to Nursery Rhymes.
Some of these were already in print. Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book[50] had appeared in 1744: two tiny volumes in Dutch flowered boards, of which the second only has survived. This was a great advance on the song-books commonly given to children as soon as they could read; but there is something more than the usual nonsense and rhythm in the Newbery rhymes. The very title: Mother Goose’s Melody,[51] brings them into touch with the first book of fairy-tales; and indeed those two voices (the child’s and the man’s) can be heard here as in Perrault—a merry new partnership of song and laughter—, the one piping high in lively see-saw, the other declaiming a mock-learned “Preface”, fitting each rhyme with an ironic “Note” or “Maxim”, burlesquing the commentators and setting the wit of nursery sages against the wisdom of the pedants.
The editor of Mother Goose’s Melody, although the Preface declares him “a very great Writer of very little Books”, has none of that contempt for “Nonsense” which philosophers are apt to show. He traces “the Custom of making Nonsense Verses in our Schools” to “the Old British Nurses, the first Preceptors of Youth”, and speaks of them with evident respect. Yet he shows no bias towards the more imaginative absurdities. It is the use of a rhyme for ironic comment, or its lyric quality that directs his choice.
The song about Betty Winckle’s Pig that lived in clover (“but now he’s dead and that’s all over”) is annotated thus: “A Dirge is a Song for the Dead; but whether this was made for Betty Winckle or her Pig is uncertain—no Notice being taken of it by Cambden or any of the famous Antiquarians”.
This is “Amphion’s Song of Eurydice”:
“I won’t be my Father’s Jack
I won’t be my Mother’s Jill