The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Nursery Rhyme Book, by Unknown

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Title: The Nursery Rhyme Book

Author: Unknown

Editor: Andrew Lang

Illustrator: L. Leslie Brooke

Release Date: August 6, 2008 [EBook #26197]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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The Nursery Rhyme Book

[Illustration: Little Bo-Peep]

THE NURSERY RHYME BOOK

EDITED BY ANDREW LANG

ILLUSTRATED BY L. LESLIE BROOKE

_Copyright 1897 by F. Warne & Co._

LONDON . FREDERICK WARNE AND CO . AND NEW YORK
MDCCCXCVII

Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
At the Ballantyne Press

[Illustration: Preface]

TO read the old Nursery Rhymes brings back queer lost memories of a
man's own childhood. One seems to see the loose floppy picture-books of
long ago, with their boldly coloured pictures. The books were tattered
and worn, and my first library consisted of a wooden box full of these
volumes. And I can remember being imprisoned for some crime in the
closet where the box was, and how my gaolers found me, happy and
impenitent, sitting on the box, with its contents all round me,
reading.

There was "Who Killed Cock Robin?" which I knew by heart before I could
read, and I learned to read (entirely "without tears") by picking out
the letters in the familiar words. I remember the Lark dressed as a
clerk, but what a clerk might be I did not ask. Other children, who are
little now, will read this book, and remember it well when they have
forgotten a great deal of history and geography. We do not know what
poets wrote the old Nursery Rhymes, but certainly some of them were
written down, or even printed, three hundred years ago. Grandmothers
have sung them to their grandchildren, and they again to theirs, for
many centuries. In Scotland an old fellow will take a child on his knee
for a ride, and sing--

"This is the way the