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 built, was the work of Oliver Goldsmith, who was for some years in Newbery's employ. However that may be, it is certain that from this date the name of Mother Goose has been almost exclusively associated with nursery rhymes. Newbery's _Mother Goose's Melody_ was soon reprinted by Isaiah Thomas, of Worcester, Massachusetts, and thus came into the hands of American children early in our national life. A long-since exploded theory was advanced about 1870 that Mother Goose was a real woman of Boston in the early eighteenth century, whose rhymes were published by her son-in-law, Thomas Fleet, in 1719. But no one has identified any such publication and there is no evidence whatever that this old lady in cap and spectacles is other than purely mythical. _Whence came the jingles themselves?_ It is certain that many nursery rhymes are both widespread geographically in distribution and of great antiquity. Halliwell and others have found references to some of them in old books which prove that many of the English rhymes go back several centuries. They are of popular origin; that is, they took root anonymously among the folk and were passed on by word of mouth. When a rhyme can be traced to any known authority we generally find that the folk have extracted what pleased, have forgotten or modified any original historical or other application the rhymes may have possessed, and in general have shaped the rhyme to popular taste. "Thus our old nursery rhymes," says Andrew Lang, "are smooth stones from the book of time, worn round by constant friction of tongues long silent. We cannot hope to make new nursery rhymes, any more than we can write new fairy tales."