Produced by Louise Hope, David Edwards and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
This e-text includes characters that require UTF-8 (Unicode) file encoding, primarily accented Greek:
If any of these characters do not display properly, or if the apostrophes and quotation marks in this paragraph appear as garbage, make sure your text reader’s “character set” or “file encoding” is set to Unicode (UTF-8). You may also need to change the default font. As a last resort, use the Latin-1 version of the file instead.
Typographical errors are listed at the end of the e-text.]
[Bookplate: 1650. SIGILL: COLL: HARVARD: CANTAB: NOV: ANGL: The Gift of Jacob Bigelow, M.D., of Boston. (H. U. 1806) 13 Nov. 1871.]
Harvard College Library-- from Dr. Bigelow--
CAMBRIDGE: _Printed_ (_Not Published_): University Press. 1871.
1871, Nov. 13 Gift of Jacob Bigelow, M.D. LL.D. of Boston. (H. U. 1806.)
University Press: Welch, Bigelow, & Co., Cambridge.
The work familiarly known as “Mother Goose’s Melodies” has the dignity of being already an undoubted classic among the most incipient cultivators of literature in the United States. It is a compilation taken mostly from “Gammer Gurton’s Garland” or the “Nursery Parnassus,” an English child’s book about a century old, of which various editions have been published in London, Glasgow, and other places. It is stated in one of its late prefaces that it was originally issued at Stockton in a small twopenny brochure, without date, printed by and for R. Christopher. Sir Harris Nicholas says it appeared in the year 1783. The American “Mother Goose” contains many interpolated articles indigenous in the Western hemisphere, which are of various, and some even of doubtful merit.
In England, the “Arundines Cami,” the “Sabrinæ Corolla,” and other representative works of distinguished seminaries, have occasionally drawn on “Gammer Gurton” for materials of their classic versions. These versions are sometimes stately in their prosodial exactness, and at other times as playfully loose as the original English ditties first set to rhyme by Gurton and afterwards copied by Goose.[A]