when he suddenly turned round, crying, "Well,
then, I dislike kicking horses, even in
paintings."

GOING TO CHAPPELL.

ONCE upon a time it seems to have been
a part of the necessary education of a well-regulated
nursery-maid, to have her mind plentifully
stored with a collection of old ballads,
which were to be sung by the bedsides of her
little charges. I speak not only from personal
experience of that not very remote once upon a
time, but from information carefully collected
among my contemporaries and predecessors in
infancy, when I assert that this acquirement, if
not deemed indispensable by the parents, and
certainly "considered" in the payment of wages,
was looked upon by the old race of nursery-maids
themselves, as a necessary qualification
for a place in the nursery, and an indispensable
branch of their professional science. My own
nursery-maid, once upon a time, was only, as
I have every reason to believe, a pretty fair
type of the common species of the day; and
certainly, her treasury of ballad-lore was as extensive
as it was varied. I am not aware, either,
that I was a more fractious or contumacious
child than the ordinary "run" of children—of
the male sex, of course I mean to say; as we
all know that children of the more privileged
sex are necessarily little angels without
encumbering wings. But I can perfectly well
remember that I invariably and most obstinately
refused to allow my light to be put out, and to
go to sleep at once, as it is to be trusted all
good little boys and girls do at the present day,
without hearing at least one (and more on high
days and holidays) of that marvellous store of
old ballads, with which good old Susan's head
was so plentifully garnished. If I say "old"
Susan, it is because my nursery-maid really did
look old to me in those days, when in truth her
age may have been about three or four-and-twenty.
She had a clear, kindly blue eye, and
a ruddy complexion—in all probability she was
a country girl—and a pleasant, low voice of
no great compass, but of considerable expression.
It seerns to me now, that she must have
possessed some natural dramatic feeling: for
pathos, terror, and humour were all conveyed
to my young mind with singular vividness. Or
was it, perhaps, that my own temperament was
naturally predisposed to such impressions?

But tins was once upon a time. Now-o'-days,
as far as I can learn, this race of nursery-maids
has died out; and old ballads are no
longer sung by the bedsides of the rising
generation. It is to be feared—perhaps it may be
considered more proper to say, it is to be hoped
—that our world has grown too wise to allow
the childish heads of our future practical young
gentlemen, and good young ladies, to be set a
dreaming by such "vain imaginings." It has
come to my knowledge, however, that "Kitty,
katty, kino," "In the Strand," "Hoop de
doodum doo," and even "The young man from
the country," who is too knowing to be "got
over" by any one (a great practical lesson that!),
are still trolled on rare occasions by the side of
little beds, and that if the "legitimate" has
disappeared from childhood's stage, a fine
"burlesque" spirit still prevails. How far this may
be, or may not be, an advantage to the rising
generation, is a vexed question, upon which I
hesitate to compromise myself.

Of course I am bound to admit, to the
disparagement of my own generation, that when
children were allowed to listen to legendary
rhymes, chanted to quaint but pleasant tunes,
and conjuring up strange visions before their
half-closed eyes, they ran the danger of being
carried away after an unwise and practical-spirit-thwarting
fashion, into naughty regions of
romance. At the same time—and I admit this
fact with an increase of shame—they were never
duly informed of the remote antiquity of their
favourite ditties, and thus, by taking a dose of
the utile along with the dulce, brought to the
knowledge of such archæological lore as is doubtless
possessed by well-educated little children
in these better-informed times. Their "thick-coming
fancies" were never even enlightened and
modified by the instruction of a little antiquarianism.
They never dreamed that these metrical
tales, which afforded them so much delight, had
been listened to, with equal rapture probably, by
their ancestors, in days when opera existed not,
or only in a very primitive form (Shakespeare's
Tempest being probably the first drama that
bore some slight resemblance to an operatic
performance of the present day), and that the
romances, dear to their little hearts, had been
chanted to other eager listeners, young and old,
centuries before they were born.

My own enlightenment upon this matter, as
well as upon many other curious details
connected with the ballads which formed the
romances of my childhood, was, I must confess, a
tardy one. It came upon me only a few years
ago, upon the perusal of MR. WILLIAM
CHAPPELL'S work on Popular Music of the Olden
Time. But, in convincing me that I was
crammed in my childhood by my attendant
nursery-spirit with a mass of ancient lore, of the
antiquity of which I was wholly ignorant, Mr.
Chappell has, at the same time, by giving the
true and faithful versions of the ballads, as
they first came before the world, forced upon
me the unwillingly received truth, that I was
then treated to variations from the original,
which, slight as they were, would have shocked
the ears of a Percy or a Ritson. It has been
a subject of wonder to me, however, that the
ditties of my childhood had, in their centuries'
progress of transmission, lost so little, instead
of so much, of their original form. Curious,
indeed, would it be to trace, were it possible,
how these old songs had been sung down by
oral tradition from mother to daughter, from
cradle to cradle, from pallet to tent-bed. But
this is a matter of archæological research, which
it would be impossible to pursue unless under