Traditional Nursery Songs of England

and that poetry does not touch your feelings. Besides, you are still unmarried, and you say, I record it with regret, "you hate children." Doubtless you were never born a child yourself. It is to mothers, sisters, kind-hearted aunts, and even fathers, who are summoned to become unwilling vocalists at break of day by young gentlemen and ladies of two years old; and to all having the charge of [Pg iv]children, who are alive to the importance of cultivating their natural keenness for rhyme, rhythm, melody, and instinctive love for fun, that I offer this first part of a collection of Traditional Nursery Songs. This Collection has been in progress for more than ten years, and it is now published, after a revision, with all the editions by Ritson, and others, that I have been able to meet with. The Pictures, though made especially for the benefit of my young audience, will not, I feel pretty sure, be uninteresting to more advanced connoisseurs. I am not at liberty to mention the names of the artists who in their kind sympathies for children have obliged me with them. It is a mystery to be unravelled by the little people themselves, who, as they advance in a knowledge and love of beauty, will not fail to recognize in the works of some of the best of our painters of familiar [Pg 5]life, the pencils of those who gave them early lessons in genuine art."