it is most wisely and happily ordained
differently by the complex construction of
the mind; so that these horrors, with nearly
all children, are not accompanied with the
frightful sense of realities and facts. But
will anybody say that they do not act upon
the imagination—that they do not furnish
it with dreadful " materials for thinking,"
as well as for dreams by night? Not a
doubt of it. Children differ, and the injury
will, therefore, be a question of degree; but
that it is an injury of some kind to all, no
one who gives the subject a fair amount of
consideration will fail to perceive.

We cannot find space to speak of the various
churchyard horrors, as they generally involve
a story. Suffice it to say, that Monk Lewis
has borrowed his " worms that crept in," and
"worms that crept out," from one of our
nursery songs. A few off-hand murders " for
tiny hands" are all we will offer,—preluding
them with an appropriate nursery incantation:—

"Hinx! minx!
The old Witch winks!
The fat begins to fry!"

"Little Dicky Dilver
Had a wife of silver;
He took a stick and broke her back,
And sold her to the miller;
The miller wouldn't have her—
So, he threw her in the river!"

"I'll tell you a story about Joll McRory.
He went to the wood, and shot a Tory!
Then he came back and told his brother,
And they went to the wood, and shot another!"

Cool, easy, wanton, funny sort of murders,
these! And here is a reward for an old
servant,—

"Barnaby Bright was a sharp little cur,
He always would bark if a mouse did but stir;
But now he's grown old, and can no longer bark—
He's condemned by the parson to be hang'd by the
clerk."

The four next, all of which we find in
Halliwell's Collection, are more practically
hideous than we were previously aware our
nursery literature, rich as we knew it to be in
these things, could furnish:—

"Who goes round my house this night?
None but bloody Tom!
Who steals all the sheep at night?
None [left] but this poor one."

"Here comes a candle to light you to bed:
Here comes a chopper!—to chop off your head."

"If she'll bear [a wild mare]
We'll give her some grains;
If she won't bear,—
We'll dash out her brains!"

"When I went up a sandy hill
I met a sandy boy, O!
/ cut his throat—I suck'd his blood!
And left his skin a hanging, O!"

We will defy any collection of Nursery
Rhymes, of any country, to beat the above,
for everything that such rhymes ought not to
describe,—unless, indeed, some of the old
Scotch rhymes and nursery legends.

"There was once a cruel mother, who murdered
one of her daughters, and made a dish of meat of
the body, which she gave her husband, who devoured
it. * * * The father, enraged at the death of
his favourite child, immediately killed the mother."

"Pippety Pew!
My mother me slew!
My father me ate!" &c.
Nursery Legends and Ballads of Scotland.

An old Scottish ballad of " Croodlen Doo,"
which follows, is a case of poisoning, by a
step-mother. The editor also gives us the
following riddle:—

"I sat wi' my love, and I drank wi' my love,
And my love she gave me a licht," &c.

Solution.— I sat in a chair made of my mistress's
bones; I drank out of her skull; and was lighted by
a candle made of her tallow!

There are two other special features which
strike us continually in our nursery doggrels
—and these are the mercenery spirit they display
on nearly every suggestion of marriage,
and also their coarse vulgarity.

"What care I how black I be,
Twenty pounds will marry me:
If twenty won't, forty shall—
I am my mother's bouncing girl.

And if you'll consent to marry me now,
I'll feed you as fat as my grandfather's sow."

"What is your fortune, my pretty maid?" &c.

"She invited me to her own house,
Where oft I've been before,
And she tumbled me into the hog-tub,
And I'll never go there any more."

"Robin the Bobbin, the big-bellied Ben,
He eat more meat than four-score men," &c

"Oh, sir! I will accept of the keys of your chest—
And count your gold and silver when you are at rest."

The lady, in the foregoing, had refused his
offer, until the chest was mentioned.

"The butcher that killed this ram, Sir,
Was up to his knees in blood," &c.

"Hannah Bantry in the Pantry,
Eating a mutton bone;
How she chaw'd it, how she graw'd it,
When she found she was alone."

"See, saw—Margery Daw," &c.

"Who comes here?
A grenadier," &c.

"There was a lady loved a hog," &c.

To whom are we indebted for these gross