The success of the _Comic Adventures of Mother Hubbard and her Dog_ was instantaneous and lasting. In _The Courtship of Jenny Wren_, which is dated 1810, while its cuts bear the date 1806, Parson Rook is represented carrying "Mother Hubbard's book," and a foot-note is added to the effect that "upwards of ten thousand copies of this celebrated work have been distributed in various parts of the country in a few months." The _Comic Adventures_ were read all over London and in the provinces, both in the original and in pirated editions, of which I have seen copies issued by J. Evans of Long Lane, West Smithfield; by W. S. Johnson of 60 St. Martin's Lane; by J. Marshall of Aldermary Churchyard; and by others. A very diminutive toy-book containing verses of the tale of Mother Hubbard, illustrated with rough cuts, is on view at South Kensington Museum among the exhibits of A. Pearson. I do not know its publisher. The _Comic Adventures of Mother Hubbard_ are usually told in fourteen verses, which refer to the dame's going to the cupboard, to her going for bread, for a coffin, for tripe, beer, wine, fruit, a coat, a hat, a wig, shoes, hose, and linen. The story ends:-- The dame made a curtsey, the dog made a bow, The dame said, "Your servant," the dog said "Bow-wow." But some editions have an additional rhyme on the dame's going for fish; and the edition at South Kensington has the verse:-- Old Mother Hubbard sat down in a chair, And danced her dog to a delicate air; She went to the garden to buy him a pippin, When she came back the dog was skipping. In the edition of Rusher, instead of "the dog made a bow," we read "Prin and Puss made a bow." In Halliwell's estimation the tale of Mother Hubbard and her dog is of some antiquity, "were we merely to judge," he says, "of the rhyme of laughing to coffin in the third verse." She went to the undertaker's to buy him a coffin, When she came back the poor dog was laughing. But it seems possible also that the author of the poem had running in his mind a verse containing this rhyme, which occurs already in the _Infant Institutes_ of 1797, where it stands as follows:-- There was a little old woman and she liv'd in a shoe, She had so many children, she didn't know what to do. She crumm'd 'em some porridge without any bread And she borrow'd a beetle, and she knock'd 'em all o' th' head. Then out went the old woman to bespeak 'em a coffin And when she came back she found 'em all a-loffing. This piece contains curious mythological allusions, as we shall see later. It may be added that the nursery collection of 1810 (p. 37) contains the first verse only of Mother Hubbard, which favours the view expressed by Halliwell, that the compiler of the famous book did not invent the subject nor the metre of his piece, but wrote additional verses to an older story.