National Rhymes of the Nursery

by Various

National Rhymes of the Nursery

"Ride a cock horse."—Page 70.

National Rhymes of the Nursery
With Introduction By
George Saintsbury
And Drawings By
Gordon Browne
London
Wells, Gardner, Darton & Co.
Paternoster Buildings, E.c.

INTRODUCTION

It is a good many years since Peacock, in one of those curiously ill-tempered and not particularly happy attacks on the Lake poets, with which he chose to diversify his earlier novels, conceived, as an ornament of "Mainchance Villa," a grand allegorical picture, depicting the most famous characters of English Nursery Tales, Rhymes, &c.—Margery Daw, Jack and Jill, the other Jack who built the House, the chief figures of "that sublime strain of immortal genius" called Dickory Dock, and the third Jack, Horner, eating a symbolic Christmas pie. At the date of Melincourt, in which this occurs, its even then admirable author was apt to shoot his arrows rather at a venture; and it may be hoped, without too much rashness, that he did not mean to speak disrespectfully of the "sublime strain of immortal genius" itself, but only of what he thought Wordsworth's corrupt following of that and similar things.