"Sing a song of sixpence" is quoted by Beaumont and Fletcher. "Buz, quoth the blue fly," which is printed in the nursery halfpenny books, belongs to Ben Jonson's Masque of Oberon; the old ditty of "Three Blind Mice" is found in the curious music book entitled Deuteromelia, or the Second Part of Musicke's Melodie, 1609; and the song, "When I was a little girl, I wash'd my mammy's dishes," is given by Aubrey in MS. Lansd. 231. "A swarm of bees in May," is quoted by Miege, 1687. And so on of others, fragments of old catches and popular songs being constantly traced in the apparently unmeaning rhymes of the nursery.
Most of us have heard in time past the school address to a story-teller:
Liar, liar, lick dish,
Turn about the candlestick.
Not very important lines, one would imagine, but they explain a passage in Chettle's play of the Tragedy of Hoffman, or a Revenge for a Father, 4to. Lond, 1631, which would be partially inexplicable without such assistance:
Lor. By heaven! it seemes hee did, but all was vaine;
The flinty rockes had cut his tender scull,
And the rough water wash't away his braine.
Luc. Lyer, lyer, licke dish!
The intention of the last speaker is sufficiently intelligible, but a future editor, anxious to investigate his author minutely, might search in vain for an explanation of licke dish. Another instance [8] of the antiquity of children's rhymes I met with lately at Stratford-on-Avon, in a MS. of the seventeenth century, in the collection of the late Captain James Saunders, where, amongst common-place memoranda on more serious subjects, written about the year 1630, occurred a version of one of our most favorite nursery songs:
I had a little bonny nagg,
His name was Dapple Gray;
And he would bring me to an ale-house
A mile out of my way.
| [8] | A dance called Hey, diddle, diddle, is mentioned in the play of King Cambises, written about 1561, and the several rhymes commencing with the words may have been original adaptations to that dance-tune. |
"Three children sliding on the ice" is founded on a metrical tale published at the end of a translation of Ovid de Arte Amandi, 1662. [9] The lines,
There was an old woman
Liv'd under a hill,
And if she ben't gone,
She lives there still—