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    The Nursery Rhyme Book (Annotated)

    By Andrew Lang

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    About

    *This Book is annotated (it contains a detailed biography of the author).
    *An active Table of Contents has been added by the publisher for a better customer experience.
    *This book has been checked and corrected for spelling errors.

    This publication contains original illustrations by Leonard Leslie Brooke.

    TO read the old Nursery Rhymes brings back queer lost memories of a
    man's own childhood. One seems to see the loose floppy picture-books of
    long ago, with their boldly coloured pictures. The books were tattered
    and worn, and my first library consisted of a wooden box full of these
    volumes. And I can remember being imprisoned for some crime in the
    closet where the box was, and how my gaolers found me, happy and
    impenitent, sitting on the box, with its contents all round me,
    reading.

    There was "Who Killed Cock Robin?" which I knew by heart before I could
    read, and I learned to read (entirely "without tears") by picking out
    the letters in the familiar words. I remember the Lark dressed as a
    clerk, but what a clerk might be I did not ask. Other children, who are
    little now, will read this book, and remember it well when they have
    forgotten a great deal of history and geography. We do not know what
    poets wrote the old Nursery Rhymes, but certainly some of them were
    written down, or even printed, three hundred years ago. Grandmothers
    have sung them to their grandchildren, and they again to theirs, for
    many centuries. In Scotland an old fellow will take a child on his knee
    for a ride, and sing--

    "This is the way the ladies ride,
    Jimp and sma',--"

    a smooth ride, then a rough trot,--

    "This is the way the cadgers ride.
    Creels and a'!"

    Such songs are sometimes not printed, but they are never forgotten.

    About the people mentioned in this book:--We do not exactly know who Old
    King Cole was, but King Arthur must have reigned some time about 500 to
    600 A.D. As a child grows up, he will, if he is fond of poetry, read
    thousands of lines about this Prince, and the Table Round where his
    Knights dined, and how four weeping Queens carried him from his last
    fight to Avalon, a country where the apple-trees are always in bloom.
    But the reader will never forget the bag-pudding, which "the Queen next
    morning fried." Her name was Guinevere, and the historian says that she
    "was a true lover, and therefore made she a good end." But she had a
    great deal of unhappiness in her life.

    I cannot tell what King of France went up the hill with twenty thousand
    men, and did nothing when he got there. But I do know who Charley was
    that "loved good ale and wine," and also "loved good brandy," and was
    fond of a pretty girl, "as sweet as sugar-candy." This was the banished
    Prince of Wales, who tried to win back his father's kingdom more than a
    hundred years ago, and gained battles, and took cities, and would have
    recovered the throne if his officers had followed him. But he was as
    unfortunate as he was brave, and when he had no longer a chance, perhaps
    he _did_ love good ale and wine rather too dearly. As for the pretty
    girls, they all ran after him, and he could not run away like Georgey
    Porgey. There is plenty of poetry about Charley, as well as about King
    Arthur.

    About King Charles the First, "upon a black horse," a child will soon
    hear at least as much as he can want, and perhaps his heart "will be
    ready to burst," as the rhyme says, with sorrow for the unhappy King.
    After he had his head cut off, "the Parliament soldiers went to the
    King," that is, to his son Charles, and crowned him in his turn, but he
    was thought a little too gay. Then we come to the King "who had a
    daughter fair, and gave the Prince of Orange her."
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