The next is of a varying texture:—
“Hush thee, my babby,
Lie still with thy daddy
Thy mammy has gone to the mill,
To grind thee some wheat,
To make thee some meat,
And so, my dear babby, lie still.”
We here find ourselves thrown back on a period when each district or village had its common mill; and all the racy stories about the jolly miller and his golden thumb, and his tricksome toll-dish, and his amours with the fair sex, come into our heads. How dull and pithless some of our earliest books of facetiæ would have been without the miller and his brother-rogue, the priest! The drollest anecdotes are of one or the other of these two. How many homes must have been rendered wretched by the visits of the goodwives to Dusty-poll and their intrigues with the sly rascal; and if the husband went in lieu of his spouse, the priest was at hand, in the grey of the morning even, to take his place. It was Scylla or Charybdis—between the devil and the deep sea.
The nursery epic of Jack the Giant-killer, of which we do not possess any archaic text or form, displays in a sort of allegory the protest of the people against the oppression of their feudal lords. This tyranny survived perhaps longest in such regions as Cornwall and Wales, or the Cornish and Welsh were unusually intolerant of it. The two-headed giant, whom Jack exterminates in Wales, may be taken to be a landlord or seigneur of a more than commonly malignant type.
Here is a final sample of a relic ostensibly recent in origin, yet on closer examination with the crust of antiquity collected upon it:—