The melodies have a circuitous literary history. In roundabout fashion, the ditties have come out of the obscure past and have been fixed at various times by editors of zealous nature. For the folk-lore student, such investigation has its fascination; but the original rhymes are not all pure food for the nursery. In the course of time, the juvenile volumes have lost the jingles with a tang of common wit. They come to us now, gay with coloured print, rippling with merriment, with a rhythm that must be kept time to by a tap of the foot upon the floor or by some bodily motion. Claim for them, as you will, an educational value; they are the child’s first entrance into storyland; they train his ear, they awaken his mind, they develop his sense of play. It is a joyous garden of incongruity we are bequeathed in “Mother Goose.” IV. JOHN NEWBERY, OLIVER GOLDSMITH, AND ISAIAH THOMAS. Wherever you wander in the land of children’s books, ramifications, with the vein of hidden gold, invite investigation,--rich gold for the student and for the critic, but less so for the general reader. Yet upon the general reader a book’s immortality depends. No librarian, no historian, need be crowded out; there are points still to be settled, not in the mere dry discussion of dates, but in the estimates of individual effect. The development of children’s books is consecutive, carried forward because of social reasons; each name mentioned has a story of its own. Two publishers at the outset attract our regard; except for them, much would have been lost to English and American children. As early as Elizabeth’s time, Rafe Newberie, Master of Stationer’s Company, published Hakluyt’s “Voyages.” From him, John Newbery (1713–1767) was descended. Given an ordinary schooling, he was apprenticed to the printer, William Carnan, who, dying in 1737, divided his worldly goods between his brother Charles, and his assistant John. The latter, in order to cement his claim still further, married his employer’s widow, by whom he had three children, Francis, his successor in the publishing business, being born on July 6, 1743.