ntomological
primers, and tales of political economy--dismal trash, all of them;
something half-way between stupid story-books and bad school-books;
being so ingeniously written as to be unfit for any useful purpose in
school and too dull for any entertainment out of it."

This is practically Charles Lamb's lament of some thirty years before.
Lamb had despised the learned Charles, Mrs. Barbauld's peg upon which
to hang instruction, and now an American Shakespeare lover found the use
of toy-books as mechanical guides to knowledge for nursery inmates
equally deplorable.

Yet an age so in love with the acquirement of solid facts as to produce
a Parley and an Abbott was the period when the most famous of all
nursery books was brought out from the dark corner into which it had
been swept by the theories of two generations, and presented once again
as "The Only True Mother Goose Melodies."

The origin of Mother Goose as the protecting genius of the various
familiar jingles has been an interesting field of speculation and
research. The claim for Boston as the birthplace of their sponsor has
long ago been proved a poor one, and now seems likely to have been an
ingenious form of advertisement. But Boston undoubtedly did once again
make popular, at least in America, the lullabies and rhymes repeated for
centuries around French or English firesides.

The history of Mother Goose and her brood is a long one. "Mother Goose,"
writes Mr. Walter T. Field, "began her existence as the raconteuse of
fairy tales, not as the nursery poetess. As La Mere Oye she told stories
to French children more than two hundred and fifty years ago." According
to the researches made by Mr. Field in the literature of Mother Goose,
"the earliest date at which Mother Goose appears as the author of
children's stories is 1667, when Charles Perrault, a distinguished
French litterateur, published in Paris a little book of tales which he
had during that and the preceding year contributed to a magazine known
as 'Moejen's Recueil,' printed at The Hague. This book is entitled
'Histoires ou Contes du Tems Passe, avec des Moralitez,' and has a
frontispiece in which an old woman is pictured, telling stories to a
family group by the fireside while in the background are the words in
large characters, 'Contes de ma Mere l'Oye.'"

It seems, however, to have been John Newbery's publishing-house that
made Mother Goose sponsor for the ditties in much the form in which we