Argutos inter strepere anser olores.
CAMBRIDGE:
PRINTED (NOT PUBLISHED):
UNIVERSITY PRESS.
1871.
University Press: Welch, Bigelow, & Co.,
Cambridge.
PREFACE.
The work familiarly known as “Mother Goose’s Melodies” has the dignity of being already an undoubted classic among the most incipient cultivators of literature in the United States. It is a compilation taken mostly from “Gammer Gurton’s Garland” or the “Nursery Parnassus,” an English child’s book about a century old, of which various editions have been published in London, Glasgow, and other places. It is stated in one of its late prefaces that it was originally issued at Stockton in a small twopenny brochure, without date, printed by and for R. Christopher. Sir Harris Nicholas says it appeared in the year 1783. The American “Mother Goose” contains many interpolated articles indigenous in the Western hemisphere, which are of various, and some even of doubtful merit.
In England, the “Arundines Cami,” the “Sabrinæ Corolla,” and other representative works of distinguished seminaries, have occasionally drawn on “Gammer Gurton” for materials of their classic versions. These versions are sometimes stately in their prosodial exactness, and at other times as playfully loose as the original English ditties first set to rhyme by Gurton and afterwards copied by Goose.[*]