The evidence which the Nursery Rhyme so often supplies of having once belonged to a remote literature and society, is not directly relevant to the present subject. But it seemed to enter into my scheme to draw attention to this among the many repertories in which the all-pervading JEST is to be found in new attire--to the hidden properties which may reside in popular trifles, and to the strange mutations which a certain section of folk-lore has undergone in the process of transmission to us. A _jeu d’esprit_ of Ben Jonson, which was not impossibly an affiliation in his case, leaves its last echo, as it were, in a witticism still more degrees below proof,--_videlicet_, the following:-- “I’ll sing you a song, Though not very long, Yet I think it as pretty as any; Put your hand in your purse, You’ll never be worse, And give the poor singer a penny.” Here the soul of the humour is, that the preamble is the text--the house is all portico, or like the shop-frontage in a pantomime. But occasionally items present themselves which are jests without any attempt at disguise, and appear more properly, indeed, to belong to Joe Miller’s Miscellany than to Aunt Louisa’s. Is this not a retort pure and simple, thrown into metrical form, rather than a little poem for little masters?-- “The man in the wilderness asked me, How many strawberries grew in the sea? I answered him, as I thought good, As many red herrings as grew in the wood.” This cross-bred effusion, with its share of epigrammatic character, is traced backward to the last century but one; it is in reality of unascertained age; it bears no chronological stamp; it is precisely a _mot_, which might have been uttered to-day or five hundred years ago. It alludes to the wild berry mentioned by Shakespear, with a probable stretch of poetic licence, as cultivated in the Bishop of Ely’s garden near Holborn in the fifteenth century; it may have been so in Gerarde the botanist’s time, a hundred years after. But the small sylvan variety must be of great antiquity. In the entire body of nursery literature, however, the humorous element seldom exceeds a sportive under-meaning; for the fully developed joke it is an uncongenial atmosphere; and the interesting constituency to which it addresses itself would not be capable of penetrating the drift of a thorough-paced _Joe_. Where such features occur in a collection of children’s rhymes, they are to be treated as waifs and strays, which have smuggled themselves in under some disguise, and require an experienced eye to single them out. All that can be said is, that the book is not much the better for them, and would not be much the worse without them. They have a bizarre air. They are apt to strike a jarring chord. [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER XII. CONTINENTAL INFLUENCE--THE “ANA”--THE “CONVIVIAL DISCOURSES”--WHIMSICAL INVENTIONS--SHAKESPEAR JEST-BOOKS--CHANGE IN PUBLIC TASTE.