thm
and structure not attainable by modern imitators. It has been perfected
through the generations by the surest of all tests, that of constant
popular use. Much of it is common to many different nations. It is an
international literature of childhood. While much of it is known to
children long before they enter school, these jingles, like all folk
literature, never lose their charm through repetition. The schools have
long since learned the value of the familiar in teaching. The process of
learning to read is usually based on some of the better known rhymes.
Teachers of literature in more advanced classes think they can generally
detect the students who have been especially "learned" in "Mother Goose
her ways" by their quick responsiveness to the facts of verbal rhythm
and rhythmical structure in more sophisticated products. "If we have no
love for poetry to-day, it may not impossibly be due to the fact that we
have ceased to prize the old, old tales which have been the delight of
the child and the child-man since the foundations of the world. If you
want your child to love Homer, do not withhold Mother Goose."

_Who was Mother Goose?_ The answer to this, as to other questions
suggested below, may be of no direct or special interest to the children
themselves. But teachers should know some of the main conclusions
arrived at by folklorists and others in their investigations of the
traditional materials used for basic work in literature. All the
evidence shows that Mother Goose as the name of the familiar old lady of
the nursery came to us from France. Andrew Lang discovered a reference
to her in a French poem of 1650, where she figures as a teller of
stories. In 1697 Perrault's famous fairy tales were published with a
frontispiece representing an old woman spinning, and telling tales to a
man, a girl, a little boy, and a cat. On this frontispiece was the
legend, _Tales of Our Mother Goose_. (See note to No. 161.)

As a teller of prose tales, Mother Goose came to England with the
translation of Perrault about 1730. We do not find her name connected
with verse until after the middle of the eighteenth century. About the
year 1760 a little book called _Mother Goose's Melody_ was issued by
John Newbery, a London publisher and a most important figure in the
history of the production of books for children. It is a pleasant and
not improbable theory that this first collection of nursery rhymes, upon
which later ones were buil