.

The common people apprehended a return of the times of her whom they
unreasonably called Bloody Mary. Sons of this marriage, they feared,
meant a long succession of princes and kings hostile to the Protestant
faith and government by the people. In 1689, when William of Orange
became king in James II.'s place, a political squib went off in the
style of a nursery lullaby, entitled "Father Peter's policy discovered;
or, the Prince of Wales proved a Popish Perkin"--

"In Rome there is a fearful rout,
And what do you think it's all about?
Because the birth of the Babe's come out!
Sing, Lalla by babee, by, by, by."

The Douce MS. contains--

"See-saw, sack a day,
Monmouth is a pretie boy, Richmond is another;
Grafton is my onely joy, and why should I these three destroy
To please a pious brother?"

At the beginning of this present century the renowned Pastorini
contributed his share to simple rhyming. A writer in the _Morning
Chronicle_ of that period points out Pastorini as being no less a
personage than the Right Rev. Charles Walmesley, D.D., a Roman Catholic
prelate, whose false prophecies under the name of Pastorini were
intended to bring about the events they pretended to foretell--the
destruction of the Irish Protestants in 1825. Just previous to this year
every bush and bramble in Ireland had this remarkable couplet affixed to
it--

"In the year eighteen hundred and twenty-five
There shall not be a Protestant left alive."

In 1835, when the efforts of the Whig Ministry to despoil the Irish
Church proved so strong, a writer in the Press caricatured Lord Grey,
Lyttleton, Dan O'Connell, and Lord Brougham in the following nursery
rhymes. The attempt was ingenious, but only of small value as showing
the rhymes to be the popular ones of that day.

"There was an old woman, as I've heard tell,
She went to the market her eggs to sell."

And--

"Robbin, a bobbin, the big-bellied Ben,
He ate more meat than threescore men;
He eat a cow, he eat a calf,
He eat a butcher and a half;
He eat a church, he eat a steeple,
He eat the priest and all the people."

The other rhymes were--

"There was an old woman went up in a basket
Ninety-nine times as high as the moon,
Where she was going I couldn't but ask it,
For in her hand she carried a Brougham!
Old woman, old woman, old woman, said I,
Why are