A century of children's books

by Florence V. Barry

I will be the Fiddler’s Wife

And have Musick when I will.

T’other little Tune

T’other little Tune

Prithee, Love, play me.

T’other little Tune.”

And this the comment (in small type, for Parents): “Those Arts are the most valuable which are of the greatest Use”.

Such gentle irony would be lost upon the serious student of Lilliputian Ethics. Grown-up wiseacres and little philosophers must have puzzled their heads in vain over some of these “Maxims” and exclaimed at the effrontery of a Writer, however “great”, who, after suggesting that an unmeaning rhyme “might serve as a Chapter of Consequence in the New Book of Logick”, could add (in a note upon “Margery Daw”): “It is a mean and scandalous Practice among Authors to put Notes to Things that deserve no Notice. (Grotius)”.

There is no direct evidence of Goldsmith’s hand in this; but he was well acquainted with nonsense-songs, and Miss Hawkins, writing of her childhood in a letter, connects him with a nursery-rhyme: “I little thought”, she says, “what I should have to boast when Goldsmith taught me to play Jack and Gill by two bits of paper on his fingers.”

If this “very great Writer of very little Books” was not Goldsmith, it is an extraordinary coincidence that the rhyme in the Preface should be the same that he sang to his friends on the first night of The Good Natur’d Man, and “never consented to sing but on special Occasions”—which runs thus: