A CENTURY
OF CHILDREN’S BOOKS

A CENTURY
OF CHILDREN’S BOOKS

BY
FLORENCE V. BARRY
B. LITT.

METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W. C.
LONDON

First Published in 1922

PREFACE

This book was begun at Oxford before the War, when I had the great privilege of being a student in Sir Walter Raleigh’s class. Through his generous encouragement, it was continued at intervals and under many difficulties; and if he had not found some things to like in it, I should hardly venture to put it forth in its present shape.

It is true that the interest of great men in little books (a token of romance since the eighteenth century) is no gauge of public favour; but the history of children’s books is in some sort a record of childhood. Lovers of children may be willing to look through the shelves of old nurseries, if only for the portraits.

The farther one goes upon such small business, the more intricate it seems; and although I began with some knowledge of the treasures that Mrs. Field had unearthed in her study of The Child and His Book, I had no idea there were so many of these books, or that I should find it so difficult to choose. In this I was helped by the older reprints, by the collections of Mr. E. V. Lucas, and later by Mr. Harvey Darton’s chapter in the Cambridge History of English Literature.

The book itself is a poor acknowledgment of my gratitude to Oxford: to Sir Charles Firth and Mr. Nichol Smith for their advice and criticism; to the late Mr. R. J. E. Tiddy and Mr. Percy Simpson for help in the early stages; to Miss Helen Darbishire, Miss Janet Spens, and not least to my fellow students at Somerville who, in the midst of serious things, found time to be amused.

F. V. B.

CONTENTS

A CENTURY
OF CHILDREN’S BOOKS

INTRODUCTION

To open a child’s book nowadays is to discover some part of that unknown world which touches experience at so many points. The city beyond the clouds, the underground country, all the enchantments of woods and islands are open to the little traveller. From The Water Babies to Peter Pan there has been little else in nursery tales but the stuff of dreams.

It is hard to believe that the child who read the story of Rosamond and the Purple Jar, less than a hundred years ago, had no curiosity about dream countries, no sense of poetry in nature; yet the first sign of a romantic movement in children’s books was the printing of unknown or forgotten fairy tales under the title of The Court of Oberon, in 1823. The actual awakening came later, with the nature stories of the Howitts and the imaginative nonsense of Edward Lear.

A century of little books had passed before a child could read fairy tales without shame, and the taste for true “histories” prevailed long after Miss Edgeworth had written her last sequel.

For although there were eighteenth century chap-books that kept alive old tales of chivalry, these had no proper place on the nursery shelves. Books written for children were always designed to instruct as well as to amuse, and it was only because the human interests of the eighteenth century included children that it became a century of children’s books.

Those that survived the use of their first owners,—a little company in old sheepskin or flowered paper covers,—are either treasured by collectors or hidden away in some old library; but some of the best are still to be had in reprints and collections of “Old-fashioned” or “Forgotten” children’s books.

The new generation, pressing forward to discover more of the dream country, cares little for tales that reflect the quiet schooling of its ancestors; yet the most moral and instructive of these books mark the child’s escape from a sterner school. It was on his way to the Child’s Garden that he passed through this town of Georgian dolls’ houses, where, indeed, he found some rare and curious things.

In the earlier centuries a child made shift with such tales as his elders chose to tell him. There were few books that he could call his own, and those were devised to advance him in knowledge or courtesy. Yet the monks of the eleventh and twelfth centuries had a way of turning the natural instincts of children to account. They taught Latin by means of imaginary conversations, and put the raw material of wonder tales into their instructive “Elucidarium”, a sort of primitive “Child’s Guide” which told of fabulous beasts and gave miraculous accounts of heaven and earth.

The successors of these old schoolmasters devised a book for parents which they might share with their children. This was the Gesta Romanorum, a collection of stories put together in Latin about the fourteenth century to serve as texts for “Moralities”. It became the popular story-book of the Middle Ages, and a woodcut in the early editions shows a whole family gathered round the fire on a winter night telling stories to pass the time.

This was no book for children, even in the days before nurseries; yet it contained variants of the Arabian Tales, a story that Chaucer afterwards used for his “History of Constance”, and two strands of the Merchant of Venice plot.

Travellers’ tales, also shared between men and children, filled a gap between the truthful records of King Alfred and Caxton’s new-discovered wealth of romance. Marco Polo and other voyagers brought back stories and fables from the East; Sir John Mandeville wrote of “the Meruayles of Ynde and of other diuerse Coûtries”. These cross the border between truth and fancy much as children do; but children knew them only from hearsay.

Caxton alone, had he been so minded, could have filled a child’s library; for besides his Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, he printed Sir Thomas Malory’s Noble Histories of King Arthur with many romances of his own translating and legends and lives of Saints. He was actually the first printer and editor of the very books which Locke, in the eighteenth century, prescribed for children: Æsop’s Fables and The History of Reynard the Fox; but Caxton intended none of these for children. The Fables showed men their follies; and Reynard was then a satire that ridiculed unjust rulers under the figures of beasts. For children, he chose the kind of books that their parents would buy: the instructive Parvus et Magnus Chato, with its woodcut print of a monastery school; Stans Puer ad Mensam, a museum of quaint formalities, and The Book of Courtesy, addressed to “Lytyl John” in “tendre enfancye”.

Thus early did grown-up persons monopolise the pleasures of fiction, while they prepared handbooks of learning and courtesy for youth. Chaucer, it will be remembered, wrote a scientific treatise instead of a story for his little boy; and The Babees Book, designed for the royal wards and pages of the fifteenth century, had not a word of romance or fable; nothing but precepts of fair behaviour, and lessons that should teach those “Bele Babees” how to give their reasons smoothly, “in words that are gentle but compendious”.

There were many such books, nor were they all confined to children of gentle birth. The Book of Courtesy was for the sons “of gentleman, yeoman or knave”, and Symon’s Lesson of Wisdom (1500) “for all manner children”.

As for Caxton’s successors, they were content with his ideas about children’s books; it was simply a choice between manners and learning. Wynkyn de Worde, though he printed the splendid romance of Bevis of Southampton, gave his child-readers a “Wyse Chylde of Thre Year Old” that could answer the fearful question: “Sage enfaunt, how is the skye made?”; and William Copland produced The Secret of Secrets of Aristotle, “very good to teach children to read English”, while he lavished the adventures of Guy of Warwick upon their parents.

It is true that the child of the sixteenth century had much to compensate him for a lack of books. If he dwelt in the country, he saw Robin Hood and St. George played out upon the village green, or if in a town, he might meet with strange merchantmen in any street. He lived in an age of practical romance, and could match you the exploits of Guy or Bevis any day from the adventures of his neighbours. Moreover the Elizabethan child, if he could not read the old stories, at least had a chance of hearing them set to a new measure. Puttenham in his Art of English Poesie (1589) writes of the “Blind Harpers and such like taverne Minstrels” who sang “stories of old time” to ballad tunes: “the tale of Sir Topas, the reportes of Bevis of Southampton, Guy of Warwick, Adam Bell and Clymme of the Clough, and such other old romances or historical rimes”.

But a boy had to evade his schoolmaster before he could listen to such things; and the schoolmaster saw to it that he had no English story-books. The new learning, which poured out its treasures for scholars, meant little more to the average boy than longer hours of study and more stripes; and reformers in education, although they looked upon him as a creature of promise, and were concerned to make his lot more bearable, came no nearer than their predecessors to the secrets of his mind.

Companies of schoolboy-players,—the children of the Chapel, or of Paul’s—might make the most of such plays as they could understand; and the Queen’s wards had times of “honest recreation” when they might tell each other stories; but their hours with tutors and music-masters would astonish the youth of these days.

Perhaps the happiest child of the great age of romance was the truant who could follow some pedlar along the road. For the pedlar’s songs were more enthralling than his “unbraided wares”; and he had ballads, such as “The Two Children in the Wood” and “Chevy Chace”, that a child could paste upon his nursery walls.

There was at least one writer who recognised the pedlar’s claims, and made him the hero of an instructive book. This was Thomas Newberry, who in 1563 wrote “A booke in English metre, of the great Marchaunt man called Dives Pragmaticus, very pretye for chyldren to rede: wherby they may the better, and more readyer, rede and wryte Wares and Implements, in this World contayned”.

This merchant knows all crafts and deals in every kind of wares; but he does it in the manner of Autolycus, calling all men to come and buy. His “Inkyll, crewell and gay valances fine” perhaps made copy for A Winter’s Tale; his “ouches, brooches and fine aglets for Kynges” might lie in the pack with

“Bugle bracelet, necklace amber,

Perfume for a lady’s chamber”;

and though he had neither songs nor ballads, he spoke in verse and could find poetry in the “chyselle” and “blade” which Stevenson, more than three centuries later, praised in his Child’s Garden:

“A chisel, both handle and blade,

Which a man who was really a carpenter made.”

It was a hard day for the men of the road when the Roundhead prevailed over King Charles. Had the Puritans been gifted with the worldly wisdom of old religious orders, the pedlar’s songs, interpreted as allegories, would have passed, with a word or two altered here and there; as it was, many of these poor merchants were reduced to carrying tracts that reflected the gloomy spirit of the times. But the seventeenth century garlands still preserved some of the older ballads, and the true Autolycus was never without copies of Tom Thumb, The Wise Men of Gotham, and other chap-books for the unregenerate. He suffered the penalties of rogues and vagabonds, and the child shared his disgrace.

George Fox, in his Warning to all Teachers, condemns, among other sins of children, “the telling of Tales, Stories, Jests, Rhimes and Fables”. The doctrine of Original Sin left no hope of grace by means of books. Courtesy, as concerning the mere outward forms and carriage of a child, was held of no account, and instruction itself was abandoned in favour of “Emblems”, “Warnings”, and morbid “Examples for Youth”: such books, for example, as James Janeway’s Token for Children, which contained “an exact account of the conversion, holy and exemplary lives and joyful deaths of several young children”: a literature of denial and negation.

And yet the greatest child’s book of the age was written by a Puritan. John Bunyan was the first to reconcile the claims of religion and romance, and he never could have written The Pilgrim’s Progress if he had not been a good customer of the pedlar in his youth. But in writing it, Bunyan had no more thought of children than Caxton when he printed the stories of King Arthur. Both were thinking of grown-up children. And when, some eight years later, Bunyan tried his hand at a Book for Boys and Girls, he made it a mere collection of “Emblems” in doggerel verse. The alternative title, Country Rhimes for Children, seems to refer to certain farmyard creatures which he introduced to point analogies even more absurd than those of the old monkish Bestiaries; but the monks had sirens and other wonderful things in their natural history. There is nothing to atone for the dulness of these rhymes; any child would be better entertained in the Interpreter’s House.

After the Restoration, the pedlar had a better market for his books, but he also came upon new enemies; for it was then that members of the Royal Society were beginning to question those “strange and wonderful Relations” which simple folk, seeing them in print, received as true.

When Shakespeare’s shepherdess asked the pedlar “Is it true, think you?” he answered “Five justices’ hands at it, and witnesses more than my pack will hold”; but these men of letters and science accepted no evidence save that of their own reason, and this was fatal to the common matter of chap-books. It is the more surprising that one of their number should have been an unacknowledged maker of children’s books.

John Locke was the first to apply the methods of the Royal Society to education. He cared neither for creeds nor grammars, followed Montaigne in denouncing the pedantry of the old schoolmasters, and held with Rabelais that “the greatest clerks are not the wisest men.”

It is true that his concern for literal truth made him a very imperfect reader of children’s minds. He never understood the part that imagination plays in a child’s life, and his plan of education allows no scope for it; yet he understood children so well on the practical side that every eighteenth century writer of little books quoted his maxims, despised romance and produced “fables” that made a certain appeal to childish interests while they proved the advantages of common sense.

Locke’s book, Some Thoughts concerning Education, which he published in 1693, was put together from the letters he had written during his exile in Holland, to Edward Clarke; but it suggests notes rather than letters. Locke so condenses the human element that it reads like a book of educational prescriptions. The key is to be found in the letters of his friends, and in the records of his pupil, the third Lord Shaftesbury, author of the Characteristics. Locke was the first earl’s friend and medical adviser, and for a time had taught his son; the third earl came to him as “Mr. Anthony” at the age of three, and was his “more peculiar charge” till he was twelve years old. After the grandfather’s death, they sent him to Westminster, entirely against Locke’s wish, for he hated schools; but when “Mr. Anthony” came to write about his childhood, he had not a good word for “pedants and schoolmasters”; only for Mr. Locke to whom, next his “immediate parents”, he owed “the highest gratitude and duty”.

Men do not write thus of tutors who were not their friends; and doubtless others could have said the same of Locke: the younger brothers of Lord Shaftesbury, the Dutch Quaker’s little boy, Arent Furly, a kind of foster-child of his in Holland, or little Frank Masham, his last pupil, who was between four and five when Locke came to live with his family. They all owed him good health and a happy childhood, and it does not appear that they hankered after the forbidden joys of romance.

Locke’s belief in physical training was a welcome contrast to the average tutor’s insistence upon books. He put aside the rod, invented games for his pupils and, as soon as possible, treated them as “rational creatures”.

By reversing the order of Books of Courtesy, he relieved them of rules and maxims. Virtue stood first in his judgment, then wisdom, then breeding, and learning last. At heart he was not less concerned for manners than the old masters of courtesy; but he thought they could only be acquired by habit and good company. It is the more curious to find him, in another part of the book, assuming that the right kind of tutor could teach Virtue and Wisdom as another might teach Latin. Locke himself came as near as a man could to his ideal of a tutor more wise than learned, a man of the world that knew how to bear himself in any company; and it mattered little to his pupils that such a tutor could not be found for every child.

Intelligent parents found in his published Thoughts some confirmation of their own experience, and his very inconsistencies made his ideas seem the more reasonable to them. For it cannot be denied that Locke, although he believed in teaching children not what, but how to think, yet fell into the error of impressing facts upon their memory, and facts that could only be learned from books. His Irish friend Molyneux, on whose advice the Thoughts were put together, brought up his little boy according to Locke’s plan, and proved that the system could produce a rival to Wynkyn de Worde’s Wyse Chylde: one that at five years old could read perfectly and trace out upon the globes “all the noted parts, countries and cities of the world”. At six, his knowledge was incredible, he was “obedient and observant to the nicest particular”, and his father believed that no child “had ever his passions more perfectly at command”.

There is nothing in Locke’s theory to account for the encyclopædic knowledge of this child; but in practice he had replaced Latin and Greek with Geometry, Chronology, the use of the Globes, and even some part of “the incomparable Mr. Newton’s” Philosophy, so far as it was justified by “Matter of Fact”.

This helps to explain the little pedantries of later children’s books, although many of these do not go beyond Locke’s directions for teaching a child to read.

“There may be Dice and Play-things with the letters on them,” he says, “to teach Children the Alphabet by Playing; and twenty other Ways may be found, suitable to their particular Tempers, to make this Kind of Learning a Sport to them. Thus Children may be cozen’d into a Knowledge of the Letters....”

If this smacks of artifice, there is no question of his wisdom about essentials: “If you have any Contests with him, let it be in Matters of Moment, of Truth and Good Nature; but lay no Task on him about A.B.C.”

About books he is very plain: when “by these gentle Ways” a child begins to read, “some easy pleasant Book, suited to his Capacity should be put into his Hands, wherein the Entertainment that he finds might draw him on, and reward his Pains in Reading, and yet not such as should fill his Head with perfectly useless Trumpery, or lay the Principles of Vice and Folly. To this purpose I think Æsop’s Fables the best, which being Stories apt to delight and entertain a Child, may yet afford useful Reflections to a grown Man; and if his Memory retain them all his Life after, he will not repent to find them there, amongst his manly Thoughts and serious Business”.

Then, after recommending an Æsop with pictures in it, he adds: “Reynard the Fox is another Book I think may be made Use of to the same Purpose”. Talking beasts that can be made the mouthpiece of a moralist are Locke’s nearest approach to the supernatural. In another place, he admonishes parents to preserve a child’s mind “from all Impressions and Notions of Spirits and Goblins, or any fearful Apprehensions in the Dark”. Thus the child is to be protected from ghost-stories or fairy-tales and “cozen’d” into reading what will be useful to him when he is a man.

Locke knew no other books in English “fit to engage the liking of children and tempt them to read”; and indeed there were few to know. The Seven Wise Masters of Rome is an example of what was thought fit for children. This was a very old sequence of Eastern parables first printed by Wynkyn de Worde. Francis Kirkman, who translated it from the French in 1674, declared that it was “held in such estimation in Ireland that it was always put into the hands of young children immediately after the horn book”. English copies were common; but the tales had less interest for children than those of the Gesta. “Pedants and Schoolmasters” must have conspired to keep it in print.

Thus at the close of the seventeenth century the greater number of children, if they read anything, amused themselves with chap-books or broadsheets,—all of which, doubtless, came under Locke’s ban as “perfectly useless Trumpery”; and for those that read no books, in spite of Locke, there were still tales “of Sprites and Goblins”.

CHAPTER I
CHAP-BOOKS AND BALLADS

Children and the Supernatural—Steele’s Account of a boy’s reading—Characteristics of chap-book “histories”—Folk-lore and legendary settings—The History of Friar Bacon—Fortunatus—Other chap-book survivals—The Georgian Autolycus—Travellers’ tales—A great chap-book—Books for men and children—Chap-books and ballads—Treatment of romances—The fairy world—Legend and history—Border and Robin Hood ballads.

Steele’s account of his two god-children[1] (perhaps the choicest of his Tatler papers) discovers the weak point of Locke’s philosophy. Nothing could so shake a blind faith in Æsop as the frank words of Steele’s little boy who, at eight years old, although he was “a very great Historian in Æsop’s Fables”, declared “that he did not delight in that Learning, because he did not believe they were true”.

His sister Betty defied Mr. Locke upon another side, for she dealt “chiefly in Fairies and Sprights”; and would “terrifie the Maids with her Accounts” till they were afraid to go up to bed.

Now, neither of these children had the least difficulty about the supernatural. The boy could have believed in beasts that talked; but he detected the man inside the lion’s skin: the man that pointed a moral. These Fables, once understood as ridiculing the follies of mankind, were no longer “true”; but there were other stories of the boy’s own choosing which, though full of magic, were true to the spirit of their kind.

Steele says he had “very much turned his studies for about a Twelvemonth past into the Lives and Adventures of Don Bellianis of Greece, Guy of Warwick, the Seven Champions, and other Historians of that Age”.

Not only does the sympathetic godfather enter into these literary adventures, as Mr. Locke, with all his wisdom, never could have done, but he knows the virtue of an unpointed moral: the boy, he says, “had made Remarks, which might be of Service to him during the Course of his whole Life. He would tell you the Mismanagements of John Hickathrift, find Fault with the passionate Temper in Bevis of Southampton and loved St. George for being the Champion of England; and by this Means had his Thoughts insensibly moulded into the Notions of Discretion, Virtue and Honour”.

In the reign of Anne, these stirring “Histories” were a part of every pedlar’s stock-in-trade. They were sold at fairs or hawked from door to door; and a boy that could never stumble through the maze of a seventeenth century folio might read as many romances as he had halfpence. Some had been among the earliest printed books. They were mostly from French originals, though Sir Bevis and Sir Guy had been “Chevaliers d’Angleterre” from the beginning. The chap-book Seven Champions and Life and Death of St. George were both based on Richard Johnson’s History of the Seven Champions, a medley of other romances in which Caxton’s “Saynt George of Capadose” had become St. George of Coventry. But the romance spirit was cosmopolitan, born of the Crusades, and foreign champions like Don Bellianis of Greece were hardly less popular.[2]

Late writers varied the old adventures; but the chap-book printer, who did his own editing, cut down the heavy matter of the folios to a bare chain of incidents. His words were few and ill-chosen, he had neither style nor grammar; but the core of interest was sound: the stories touched the imagination of his readers like ballads and fairy tales.

Gallant Knights came straight from the fields of France to the magnificence of Eastern cities; youths, setting out from the English towns, adventured among dwarfs and Saracens, giants and dragons, and won their knighthood by the way.

If the hero never failed to subdue his enemies and win a lady of surpassing beauty, there was still a doubt (enough to keep the reader curious) whether a rival would snatch her from him and put him upon a more dangerous adventure to win her back; or whether, if they fared on together, they would meet an enchanter or a giant first.

Repetition seldom tires a child. The feats of Acquitaine could be repeated at Damascus; and the wood-cuts in the chap-books proved that Montelion and Parismus could fight in the armour of Don Bellianis or St. George. Nor was it a chance association of the pedlar’s pack which threw these champions into the company of a village strongman, John Hickathrift, more commonly called Tom; for although Hickathrift fought with a cart-wheel and axle-tree for shield and sword, he could beat the best of them at giant-killing.[3]

The romances, indeed, are full of the common stuff of folk-lore. If the hero blow a trumpet at a castle-gate, a giant may be expected; if he blow it at the mouth of an enchanted cave, a prophetic voice replies, or if he enter the cave by chance, he may find the prophecy inscribed on a pillar of sapphire—the prelude, in Don Bellianis, to the coming of the Enchantress through a pair of ivory gates.

A hundred folk-tales tell of the Princess rescued from a dragon; transformation is an affair of every day: Don Bellianis slays a magician “in the shape of a griffin”; St. Denis, in the Seven Champions, is transformed into a hart, the Princess of Thessaly into a mulberry-tree; and St. David sleeps seven years in an enchanted garden—the Magic Sleep of the fairy tales. Nor is the champion of romance without his wonderful sword or cloak.

The Sword “Morglay” (no more than a stout weapon in the old version of Sir Bevis) is called “wonderful” in the chap-books. Don Bellianis draws a magic sword from a pillar, as Arthur pulled his out of the stone; St. George has invincible armour; and the later History of Fortunatus is the tale of a Wonderful Purse and a Wishing Cap.

But whoever looks upon a child as a pure romantic, has learned but half his lesson; for in many tales that have stood the test of time, there is little interest outside sheer matter of fact; and even the romances owed something to legendary settings which touched a borderland of truth. To know that Bevis lived in the reign of Edgar, that Guy, returning from his pilgrimage, found King Athelstane at Winchester, beset by the Danes, would confirm a child’s belief; but the little reader of chap-books knew more than this; he could give the exact measurements of Tom Hickathrift’s grave in Tilney Churchyard, knew where to find Guy’s armour and his porridge-pot at Warwick, and never doubted that Bevis built Arundel Castle for love of his horse.

It might be done indeed, for such a horse: no mere product of a wizard’s cunning, but a steed fit to carry a champion: alive as the persons of the romances never were. He figures in every adventure, carries the thread of the story from point to point, and yet stands out, a very symbol of romance.

The chap-book writer makes no picture of the knighting of Bevis, and never mentions his shield with the three blue eagles on a field of gold; but he remembers well enough how the Saracen King’s daughter, Josian the fair, presented Bevis with the sword “Morglay” and the “wonderful steed called Arundel”.

From that point the story goes to a sound of hoofs; and though the King betrayed Bevis into the hands of his enemy and gave the horse Arundel to Bevis’s rival, King Jour, and though Bevis lay in a dungeon for seven years, Josian herself was not more faithful to him than Arundel; for when at last he escaped, and came, disguised as a poor pedlar, to the castle of Jour, Josian knew him not; but Arundel, hearing his master speak, “neighed and broke seven chains for joy”.

As to the men and women of romance, they borrowed life from their adventures, but apart from these, were mere types of strength or beauty. The original portraits, though vague, were not without poetry: the impression of “The Squyere Guy” has a hint of Chaucer:

“Feyre he was and bryght of face,

He schone as bryght as ane glace.”

The chap-book writer contents himself with the remark that King Ermine was “prepossessed with Guy’s looks”. He bestows more care on the heroine, Felyce, but covers the faint outline with his trowel. Felyce, once

“the Erlys Doghtur, a swete thynge”,

becomes “this heavenly Phillis, whose beauty was so excellent that Helen the pride of all Greece might seem as a Black a Moor to her”.

Many striking situations and dramatic incidents of the older stories are lost in the chap-books, for want of picture-making phrases and live speech. A name here and there, such as Brademond, King of Damascus, would lift a boy like a magic carpet, and set him down among Saracen pavilions; bare facts might call up pictures; there was the ransom of King Jour,—“Twenty tun of gold and three hundred white steeds”; but the unlettered writer shirked most of the details which, in telling the story aloud, he would express by gestures. The fine fight with the dragon, in Guy of Warwick, makes but a paragraph in the chap-book; the monster’s head is off before the fight is well begun. Not even a “picture of the dragon, thirty feet in length, worked in a cloth of arras and hung up in Warwick Castle for an everlasting monument” could make amends for this.

Yet a child, making his own pictures out of the poor phrases of these writers, might have in his mind’s eye something not unlike the images of the old translator: the boy Bevis on a hillside with his sheep, looking down at the Castle “that should be his”; the four Knights selling him to the Saracen merchantmen; or the giant Ascapart wading out to the ship, with Bevis and Josian and the horse Arundel tucked under his arm.

These stand in clear outline, and, in the roughest shape, have suggestions of pathos or incongruity; but they pass at once into action, which is what a child wants: the boy comes down from the hill, forces his way into the castle and attacks the usurper with his shepherd’s crook; the Saracens carry him overseas, and set him in the way of adventure; Ascapart proves himself “a mariner good at need”, hoists sail and brings his master and mistress safely into harbour.

Laughter is rare in the romances, but this story of Ascapart has a humour of its own. Bevis, having beaten the giant, spares his life on condition that he becomes his servant; and in the course of their adventures the vanquished rescues the victor, the servant picks up his master and carries him about like a toy. Such a feat measures the great creature more effectually than the exact method of the chap-book writer: “thirty Foot high and a Foot between his eyebrows”.

Another “famous History” which came with these into the chap-books, was that of Valentine and Orson, first printed by Wynkyn de Worde, and reprinted at the close of the nineteenth century as an “old fairy tale”. It has some novel features besides the usual stage properties of romance. Of the twin brothers separated in childhood, one is brought up at Court and trained in knightly exercises; the other carried off by a bear and nourished with her cubs. This is a foretaste of The Jungle Book:

“In a cave, the bear had four young ones, among whom she laid the child to be devoured, yet all the while the young bears did it no harm; but with their rough paws stroked it softly. The old bear, perceiving they did not devour it, showed a bearish kind of favour towards it, inasmuch that she kept it and gave it suck among her young ones for the space of one year”.

The second chapter records how the bear’s nursling, Orson, grew up into a Wild Man, and how the young knight Valentine, his brother, meeting him in a wood, won a victory of skill against strength; after which, still unconscious of their relationship, he tamed the Wild Man and taught him the arts of chivalry.

The more magical elements of the story have a flavour of the East, and doubtless belong to the older strata of Eastern romance. The adventure of the Dwarf Pacolet suggests the tale of the “Magic Horse” in the Thousand and One Nights; for by his art this dwarf, who was an Enchanter, “had contrived a horse of wood, and in the forehead a fixed pin, by turning of which he could convey himself to the farthest part of the world”.

Many such marvels, related during the Middle Ages by merchants or Crusaders returning from the East, had been caught up in the weavings of romance; but it is a sort of magic that has little to do with the myth-making power of childhood. Pacolet’s flying horse is made of wood; the touch of its hoof never brought water from a mountain-side. It represents the magic of ingenuity which comes half-way between pure romance and the practical marvels of a scientific age.

Indeed, it is but a step from the flying horse of Eastern tales to Roger Bacon’s horseless chariots and flying “instruments”. The “Learned Friar”, a clerk of Oxford in the thirteenth century, foretold many things to be performed by “Art and Nature”, wherein should be “nothing magical”. Yet he studied such strange matters that he was persecuted for practising magic, and the chap-books set him down a conjurer. The Enchanted Head of Brass which in Valentine and Orson reveals the parentage of the brothers, reappears in the Famous History of Friar Bacon, as the Brazen Head, wrought in so many sleepless nights by the Friar and his brother-in-magic, Friar Bungay.

Greene, in his play of Fryer Bacon and Fryer Boungay (1591), follows this well known tract,[4] which came down with few changes to the eighteenth century. Here the old magic machinery goes with the light movement of a popular tale. The Brazen Head should have disclosed a secret whereby Friar Bacon “would have walled England about with brass”; but the stupidity of his servant Miles prevented it. For when the two magicians, worn out with toil, lay down to sleep, they set him to watch the Head, commanding him to call them the moment it should speak; and he, the while, kept up his spirits “with tabor and pipe and song”.

When at last the Head spake these words: “Time Is,” and no more, Miles, understanding nothing by that, fell to mockery: “If thou canst speak no wiser, they shall sleep till doomsday for me. Time is! I know Time is, that you shall hear, Goodman Brazen Face!”

So saying, he fitted the words to the tune of “Dainty, come thou to me”, and sang for half-an-hour. Thereupon the Head spake again, saying two words and no more: “Time Was”; whereat the Simpleton railed afresh, and another half-hour went by.

Then the Brazen Head spake again, these words: “Time is Past”, and then fell down; and presently followed a terrible noise, with strange flashes of fire, so that Miles was half-dead with fear.

“Out on thee, villain,” cried Friar Bacon, “thou hast undone us both; hadst thou but called us when it did speak, all England had been walled about with brass, to its glory and our eternal fame.”

Locke’s followers were never tired of setting the “plain Magique of tru Reason’s Light” against Friar Bacon’s conjurings. There were later moralists who recognized the Wizard as a pioneer of science; but these would have none of his magic, and rejected all tales of undeserved good fortune.

Wordsworth alone had the courage to tum a child loose in the enchanted woods. He praised The History of Fortunatus, which is more like “Aladdin” than any tale of chivalry. By sheer luck the Spendthrift finds a Galley of Venice lying at anchor and gets his choice of gifts. These vanished like fairy gold in the hands of his sons, and children remembered little else but his Wishing Cap and his Purse that never was empty. Yet Fortunatus was a name to conjure by, and the pure spirit of adventure was in his first setting out, as the woodcut shows, “with a Hawk in his Hand”.

It seems odd that the eighteenth century child should have ballads about King Arthur and his Knights, but no account of them in prose. Malory’s “Noble Histories”, like the once famous cycles of Amadis and the Palmerins, escaped the chap-book writers; but they had one or two relics of the old Historyes of Troye, in which Priam’s palace had become an enchanted castle, and Hector a knight errant.

The pedlar had no chronology. Patient Grissel, fresh from a new translation of Boccaccio, was a lady of the eighteenth century, and what pleased the country fireside of 1700 still pleased it in 1760. The tales that Mr. Burchell gave the children in The Vicar of Wakefield might have come out of a chapman’s bundle in almost any part of the century: “the story of the Buck of Beverland, with the History of Patient Grissel, the Adventures of Catskin and then Fair Rosamond’s Bower.”

Among other “useless Trumpery” were riddles, nonsense-books and farcical tales of rogues or simpletons.[5] These are full of the topsy-turvy nonsense that children love, and the coarse jests from which they were seldom guarded. The older stories, even when they deal with everyday life, give it a romantic flavour. The Cobbler feasts with the King; the Valiant London Prentice leaves his shop on London Bridge, and sets out to joust with eastern princes. A Tudor pedlar, Tom Long, in the course of his absurd adventures, visits the Cave of the Seven Sleepers, whose story makes a welcome interlude:

“Coming to the town, they found everything altered, the inhabitants being other sort of people than they were the night before. So, going to buy food, the people refused to take their money, saying they knew not the coin; but enquiring further, found that since their being there, three generations had been dead and the fourth was in being”.

Tom Long was the puppet of a nonsense-book; but other chap-books, following Deloney, told the “true histories” of industrious fortune-makers who were not out of place in a commercial age; and the life of an eighteenth century pedlar was plain enough to pass for truth. An account (in a late Stirling tract)[6] of the “Flying Stationer”, Peter Duthie, shows that he took up his trade in 1729, when he was eight years old, and was upon the road for eighty years—a Georgian Autolycus, known for his quaint wit “in every city, town, village and hamlet in great Britain”. At some time, perhaps, he sold “lives” of his brethren Dougal Graham and John Cheap the Chapman, whose story was “moralised” by Hannah More.

The traveller is always a romantic figure. No amount of fact can take the pleasure of expectation and surprise out of a journey, and the setting of most chap-books was a journey by land or sea. The “Flying Stationer” asked no more for the Wonderful Voyages of Sir John Mandeville than for the rough yarn of a ship-wrecked sailor.

This last, if it pointed a moral, might serve a double purpose, for the old allegories were dying out, except in burlesques. Abstractions always had a way of coming alive when they set foot on English ground, and The History of Laurence Lazy, of “Lubberland Castle in the County of Sloth” was no mere allegory of Idleness, but the tale of a scapegrace who, to the joy of all children, got the better of the Schoolmaster, the Squire’s Cook and the Farmer. His “Arraignment and Trial” in the Town Hall of “Never Work” was a triumphant apology for idlers; yet a scene like this may have suggested the symbolic trial of Christian and Faithful in the Town of Vanity.

That splendid chap-book, The Pilgrim’s Progress,[7] is built up of such things. Bunyan’s reading, outside the Bible (although he counted it among his sins) had acquainted him with romances, tales of magic and enchantment, “histories” of live persons; and all these, or nearly all, were concerned with adventures upon the road.[8]

Bible stories and Christian legends were common in Bunyan’s youth. There was a versified “history” of Joseph and his Brethren, and the beautiful legend of the Glastonbury Thorn was as well known as that of The Seven Sleepers or The Wandering Jew.

But The Pilgrim’s Progress dealt in terms of unmistakable experience with the journey that every man must go; the figures of its allegory were live persons, such as a man might meet upon any road, and its setting changed as the way ran through towns and villages, past fields and sloughs and thickets, over hills where the surest-footed might fall “from running to going and from going to clambering upon his hands and knees, because of the steepness of the place”, or beside rivers that ran through meadows and orchards, with lilies underfoot, and above, “green trees with all manner of fruit”.

These things give place at certain points, as they do in life, to the scorched plains of torment, the overwhelming Shadow of Death, or, where the river and the way for a time part, to the Dungeon of Despair. There are glimpses by the way of strange and beautiful lands, of vineyards and mountains upon which “the sun shineth night and day”; but here also is the road running through the midst of the country to a city more splendid than the cities of romance, for “it was builded of pearls and precious stones, also the streets thereof were paved with gold”.

The child would start on this journey with some knowledge of his bearings, for, like Bunyan, he had set out on an earlier pilgrimage with Guy of Warwick.[9] At the Palace Beautiful, he would remember how Montelion had been armed by nymphs, and at Doubting Castle, how Bevis had escaped from his prison in Damascus.

No knight ever strove with giant or dragon as Christian struggled with Apollyon; none of the Seven Champions had encountered the dangers of this road. Yet these were adventures that might happen to a man in the midst of his ordinary business; that much a child might understand beneath the surface of romance which for him is the chief matter of the book.

This was the first of three great books which pleased both men and children in the eighteenth century. The others are Robinson Crusoe[10] and The Travels and Adventures of Captain Lemuel Gulliver.[11] Each, in its own kind, is a Voyage Imaginaire and the unwrought matter of all three was to be found in chap-books. The tale of the shipwrecked man had never been told with such apparent truth as in Robinson Crusoe. Readers of the chap-book history of Drake, who were familiar with accounts of “Monsters and Monstrous People”, would read this sober journal as the purest matter of fact; nor was there anything beyond belief in Gulliver’s adventures, to anyone who knew the pedlar’s book of Sir John Mandeville. For here, among greater marvels, was a notable account of giants and pigmies.

The island setting of Robinson Crusoe, the figure of Friday, the footprint in the sand, belong to the world of romance; so do the giants and dwarfs of Gulliver. Yet in both books, the things that happen are human and practical; the setting gives scope for the chief interests of the century: men and morals and matters of fact. Defoe pointed his moral, and as an afterthought explained the Voyage of Robinson Crusoe as an allegory of his life; Swift used the contrary device of satire. But no child was ever concerned with an under-sense, where he could follow every turn of the adventure. A philosopher would not have discovered Crusoe’s allegory, and a child is more likely to suspect satire in Reynard the Fox than in Gulliver.

The adventures of Lilliput and Brobdignag are the convincing “history” of a nation of Tom Thumbs and a nation of Blunderbores; only a little Gradgrind would question their truth. A child reading The Pilgrim’s Progress is himself the Pilgrim; in the adventure of the island he is the shipwrecked man; and in the Travels, first the big man upon whose body the little men climb with ladders, then the little man, paddling his toy boat to amuse the giants.

These books, like the romances, were for little men as well as big ones; but their authors renewed the old devices by a masterly simple style. They made pictures such as were never found in chap-book prose, and rarely in tales that had passed into ballad form.

The eighteenth century pedlar had fewer ballads than his predecessors; yet those he had, like the songs of Autolycus, were “for man or woman, of all sizes”.

Ballad tunes, from Shakespeare to Wordsworth, were “Food for the hungry ears of little ones,” and there is something in the simple conventions of ballads that suggests the story-telling of a child. Those printed ballads, “darling songs of the common People”, which Addison found upon the walls of eighteenth-century houses, attracted him by their classic simplicity, but the two he liked the best: “Chevy Chase” and “The Two Children in the Wood”, had been the joy of Elizabethan nurseries.[12]

Most of the chap-book stories were sung as ballads. “The Seven Champions”, “St. George”, “Patient Grissel” and “The London Prentice” were all in the Collection of Old Ballads printed in 1723, with “The Noble Acts of King Arthur” from Malory;[13] and others were reprinted in Percy’s Reliques (1765) from a folio manuscript of the seventeenth century.

The ballad maker, dealing with romances, preferred short episodes. A tedious story would never go to his quick measures; but by laying his chief stress on speech and movement, or adding a refrain, he made a thing quite unlike the short versions of the chap-books, and gave a certain dramatic unity to the separate parts.

Thus the incident of “Guy and Colebrande”, in Percy’s folio, had been chosen from Guy of Warwick, and the ballad of St. George, in the Collection of 1723, deals only with the dragon story. Some ballads, it is true, cover a sequence of adventures. “The Lord of Lorn,”, like Bevis of Southampton, gives the whole story of a child robbed of his inheritance: a shepherd boy that should have been a lord; and the scene changes from Britain to France and back again; but so much is told in dialogue that the story dances to its end:

“Do thou me off thy sattin doublett

Thy shirtband wrought with glistering gold,

And doe mee off thy golden chaine

About thy necke so many a fold.

“Do thou me off thy velvett hat.

With fether in that is so ffine;

All unto thy silken shirt

That’s wrought with many a golden seam.

...

“‘What must be my name, worthy Steward?

I pray thee now, tell it me:’

‘Thy name shalbe Pore Disaware,

To tend sheepe on a lonelye lee.’”

Of the fairy world revealed in “Thomas Rymer”, the ghostly suggestion of “The Wife of Usher’s Well,” there is no trace till the close of the century. The true ballads of Elfland are more song than story, and rise by suggestion above the simplicity of fairy tales:

“O they rade on and farther on,

And they waded rivers abune the knee

And they saw neither sun nor moon,

But they heard the roaring of the sea.”

The breath of enchantment is rare in English ballads. There is nothing in print before Scott’s Minstrelsy like the magic of these lines; but Percy reprinted a sixteenth century ballad, “The Mad-Merry Prankes of Robbin Goodfellow” which Puck himself might have sung:

“From Oberon in Fairyland

The King of ghosts and shadows there,

Mad Robbin I at his command

Am sent to view the night-sports here.

What revell rout

Is kept about

In every corner where I goe

I will oresee

And merry be

And make good sport with ho, ho, ho.”

This is the triumphant laughter of a child. The “shrewd and knavish sprite” has neither the delicacy of smaller fairies nor the courtly dignity of his master. He is the spirit of childish mischief: greeting night-wanderers “with counterfeiting voice”, shape-changing, “whirrying” over hedges and pools, or playing tricks on lads and lasses at village feasts. “Hobgoblin” or “sweet Puck”, half-child, half-fairy, he roams the English country,

“Through woods, through lakes,

Through bogs, through brakes,

Ore bush and brier”,

and boasts of greater powers.

There is no doubting either voice or words:

“More swift than lightning can I flye

And round about this ayrie welkin soone.

And in a minutes space descry

Each thing that’s done belowe the moone”.

There are two more fairy songs in the Reliques: one given “with some corrections” from a seventeenth century garland, the other, Bishop Corbet’s “Farewell” to the fairies. The first contradicts the second, for obeying the invocation

“Come, follow, follow me

You fairy elves that be”,

a team of little atomies appear, proving that they were never out of England since Shakespeare wrote, but “unheard and unespy’d”, were gliding through Puritan key-holes and spreading their feasts while the Bishop was composing his lament,

“Farewell, rewards and fairies!”

Yet these, like Robin Goodfellow, are spirits of Earth; they eat more than fairy bread. A mortal surely suggested the details of their feast, but they dance a fairy measure:

“The grasshopper, gnat and fly,

Serve for our minstrelsy;

Grace said, we dance awhile,

And so the time beguile;

And if the moon doth hide her head,

The gloe-worm lights us home to bed.

“On tops of dewie grasse

So nimbly do we passe;

The young and tender stalk

Ne’er bends when we do walk:

Yet in the morning may be seen

Where we the night before have been.”

Rhymed nursery tales seldom show the true ballad quality. The only children’s stories in the Collection of 1723 are “The Children in the Wood”, and “Sir Richard Whittington”: the one a true ballad, newly licensed and approved by Addison; the other (also mentioned in the Spectator) taking precedence of such rhymes as “Catskin” and “Tom Thumb” for a popular grafting of the romance of Fortune upon a stock of historical fact.

Southern ballad-printers favoured the merry or tragic themes of legend and history,[14] and if few of their songs had the trumpet-note of “Chevy Chase”, they lacked neither freshness nor vigour. Some, like “the Blind Beggar’s Daughter of Bednall-Green”, gave a fresh turn to Elizabethan traditions, and made up for indifferent workmanship by a plentiful force of rhythm. Late nursery poets could not better this trick of the ballad-maker’s:

“It was a blind beggar that long lost his sight,

He had a fair daughter of beauty most bright;

And many a gallant brave suitor had she,

For none was so comely as pretty Bessee.”

Another of these old broadsides, “Johnny Armstrong’s Last Good Night” appeared among Dryden’s Miscellanies in 1702, in the Collections of 1723 and 1724, and again in Evans’s Old Ballads (1777).

“The music of the finest singer is dissonance,” wrote Goldsmith, “to what I felt when our old dairymaid sung me into tears with Johnny Armstrong’s last Good Night or the Cruelty of Barbara Allen.”

These are the true stuff of ballads; but a child cares most about action, and, asked to choose between them, would be pretty sure to call for the Border Song.

The story of John Armstrong, which came down to prose in the chap-books, has points in common with “Robin Hood”, but John and his “Merry Men” have no touch of Robin’s careless humour. They fight like the heroes of Chevy Chase, and ask no quarter:

“Said John, Fight on, my merry men all,

I am a little hurt, but I am not slain.

I will lay me down for to bleed a while

Then I’le rise and fight with you again.”

The pirate song of “Sir Andrew Barton”[15] is a sailor’s variant of this. Lord Howard defies Sir Andrew upon the high seas much as Erle Percy, in despite of the Douglas, takes his pleasure in the Scottish woods. There was never a better fight on shore, and when at last the pirate falls to an English bowman, he repeats the border cry:

“‘Fight on, my men!’ says Sir Andrew Barton,

‘I am hurt, but I am not slain;

I’le lay mee downe and bleed awhile,

And then I’le rise and fight again’.”

Sir Andrew stands out from his fellows, though the portrait is not to be compared with Robin Hood’s; and the king himself speaks his epitaph:

“‘I wo’ld give a hundred pound,’ says King Henrye

‘The man were alive as he is dead!’”

Another of these narrative ballads, “Adam Bell”,[16] has a forest background that suggests Robin Hood:

“Merry it was in grene forest

Among the leves grene

Where that men walke both East and West

Wyth bowes and arrowes kene.”

The full title, “Adam Bell, Clim of the Clough and William of Cloudesley”, has a sufficing rhythm, and the story is good; not unlike a Norse Saga, where they set fire to the outlaw’s house, and like William Tell, where Cloudesley splits an apple on his son’s head at six score paces.

But the true Robin Hood ballads take a child into his own country, and he finds it peopled with his friends. From the first stanzas of “The Curtall Friar”, he is Robin’s man:

“In summer time, when leaves grow green

And flowers are fresh and gay

Robin Hood and his merry men

Were disposed to play.”

In this play-humour, the outlaws themselves are children, as every child is by nature an outlaw. They know better than to take life for a serious business. To them, as to a child, it is one long and absorbing game of make-believe.

Robin, like Fulk Fitz-Warine or Hereward, could play at any trade—a potter, a beggar, a shepherd, a fisherman. His band were mostly men who had forsaken some dull craft for this great game of hiding and hunting and robbery. In the midst of active enjoyment, they set themselves to redress the unequal balance of fortune; but they never doubted their own solid advantages over sheriffs and abbots,—the people who dwelt in towns and cloisters, and had forgotten how to play.

Early collectors of the eighteenth century found no ballads that echoed the sound of the greenwood:

“notes small

Of Byrdis mery syngynge”,

or that made pictures of the deer shadowed in green leaves; but there were imitations of the older songs, and the setting was always implied.

After 1765, there must have been children who knew the prelude to “Guy of Gisborne”, from Percy’s Reliques:

“When shaws been sheene and shradds full fayre,

And leaves both large and longe,

It is merrye walking in the fayre forrest,

To heare the small birdes songe.

“The woodweele sang and wold not cease,

Sitting upon the spraye

So lowde, he wakened Robin Hood

In the greenwood where he lay.”

A child cares little about landscape for its own sake, but much for the things which it suggests. Here, the setting is essential to the game these outlaws are playing; they are as much a part of it as the deer they chase. The beauty of the forest and the song of birds lead on to the adventure; but they are as nothing compared to the romantic fact that this is a place where any man may meet with Robin Hood.

In the same way, a child appreciates character as it affects the course of events. Robin Hood’s men are neither an army nor a clan; they join his company of their own free choice, after proof of sportsmanship; and the chief of them—Little John, Scarlett and Much the miller’s son, are distinct personalities. The result is a spirit of individual adventure which gives the stories unusual interest and variety.

The earliest songs of Robin Hood had grown into a ballad-epic, “A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hood”,[17] in which Robin’s character was proved in talk and incidents, and further shown by the story-teller’s comments on his courage and gentleness, his respect for women, his love of the forest; but gentle attributes failed to impress the writers of eighteenth century broadsheets. They recall the more obvious traits by a few epithets:

“I will you tell of a bold outlaw,”

or

“A story of gallant brave Robin Hood

Unto you I will declare.”

Taking the rest for granted, they deal directly with Robin’s combats and escapes, his farcical adventures with bishops and beggars, his daring rescues; and in these, the quality that comes uppermost is the roguish humour which above all distinguishes him from the conventional knight of chivalry.

A single attempt to connect him with the romances—the late ballad of “Robin Hood and the Prince of Aragon”—marks the difference of kind; for though Robin kills the prince, and John and Scadlock bag a giant apiece, they move like live men among shadows.

The children of the eighteenth century did not meet the outlaws of the “golden world”. They knew the Curtal Friar and Alan a Dale, and what happened when Robin Hood

“Weary of the Wood-side

And chasing of the fallow deer,”

tried his fortunes at sea. They had two ballads at least that varied old themes of the Geste, “Robin Hood and the Bishop” and “The King’s Disguise”. And Little John was their friend,—not of course, the old Little John who praised the season in the words of a poet; but “A jolly brisk blade right fit for the trade”, more like the scapegrace in a popular “History”.

Robin Hood’s Garland, printed in 1749, gave a mere collection of stories for the sequence of the Geste, and many chap-books copied it in prose; but a rough cadence is better than none, and Robin Hood was first praised in a ballad.

The chap-books, indeed, were no more than the dead leaves of romance; it took the vivid play of a child’s fancy to revive them; but whatever the ballad-maker touched,—fairy tale or legend or history,—he made a new thing of it: a story to sing or tell, but short enough to be sung or told many times over.

CHAPTER II
FAIRY TALES AND EASTERN STORIES

Unwritten fairy tales—“Child Rowland”—Traditional matter and printed books—The History of Thomas Hickathrift—Giants and Dwarfs—Logic and Realism in Tom Thumb—Lack of Magic in English Folk-tales—Whittington and his Cat—Perrault’s Contes—The partnership between Youth and Age—English versions—“Court” adaptations and “moral” fairy tales—Eastern stories—The “little yellow canvas-covered book”—Nursery criticism—Aladdin and Sinbad—The “Oriental Moralist”—Traditional tales moralised: Tom Thumb and Robin Goodfellow—The Two Children in the Wood—The Enchanted Castle.

Fairies were not altogether unknown in the Age of Reason, though the Royal Society kept no record of their delicate transactions. The little Betty of Steele’s paper, who terrified the maids with her accounts of “Fairies and Sprights”, must have learned them, as children do, from the “Grasshoppers’ Library”; for the pedlar had no such tales in print.

They were sometimes told as a mixture of ballad and fairy tale—a story with snatches of ballad rhyme. Children guarded them jealously, passing them on word for word, with none of the slips that a printer would have made.

Such a tale was “Child Rowland”, first set down by Jamieson in 1814,[18] as an old country tailor told it to him when he was seven or eight years old. But that old tailor had heard it in his own childhood, and so, doubtless had his great-grandfathers in theirs; for this tale of the three brothers seeking their lost sister, of her being stolen by the King of Elfland and kept under a spell, is the same that Shakespeare quoted in King Lear:

“Child Rowland to the dark tower came,

His word was still ‘Fie, foh and fum,

I smell the blood of a British man’.”

A child would remember the giant-formula, though he forgot every word of that “easy pleasant Book, suited to his Capacity” which Mr. Locke prescribed for him; he would remember the whole exquisite story: how the youngest brother found his sister, and what passed between them (most of it in rhyme) and how he fought with the Elf-King and broke the spell.

If Child Rowland had been the only story of its kind, Mr. Locke had yet to reckon with the fancies that a child might weave for himself out of common experience: the moving tree that casts the shadow of a pursuing giant, the wind that wears an invisible cloak, the enchanter sun who can pave any road with gold. These baffled all his efforts to drive fairies out of the nursery.

But printed tales, before Perrault, were few enough: in prose, the giant killers, “Hickathrift” and “Jack”; in rhyme, “Catskin” and “Tom Thumb” and “Whittington”. Like printed ballads, they favoured themes of action and reality. Catskin, the English Cinderella, did without a fairy godmother; Tom Thumb, although he tilted with the knights of the Round Table, never saw Fairyland till he died, and Whittington’s cat was a mere mouser, a poor relation of Puss in Boots.

The truth is that a child never asks himself whether a tale belongs to the dream world or to the world of reality, because either will serve his turn, and either may be true. Any setting convinces him if the adventure hold; and a tale that lost its imaginative colouring in the chap-books might regain it in a winter night.

Between 1690 and 1790, there is little change in “The Pleasant History of Thomas Hickathrift”,[19] and not a trace in print of the “astonishing image” that Coleridge remembered: the “whole rookery that flew out of the giant’s beard, scared by the tremendous voice with which this monster answered the challenge of the heroic Tom Hickathrift”.[20] The nearest thing to it (in a chap-book of 1780) is the likening of the giant’s head, when it was off, to “the root of a mighty Oak.” But this image of the monstrous beard, a piece of pure myth, if it were not the addition of some imaginative teller, came down from a time when childlike men invented it to explain the giant shapes of trees. A child, recognizing the analogy, feels the same shock of surprise and pleasure as his forest-dwelling ancestors, and finds in this play of likeness and contrast, the source and sustaining interest of all giant tales. For there never was a giant without dwarfs to measure him, nor a dwarf that had not his giant; nor indeed is Jack’s fight with Blunderbore a more engrossing spectacle than Tom Thumb dancing a Galliard on the Queen’s left hand.[21]

Yet there is little of the fairy about Tom Thumb. He is a real child, mischievous, even thievish,—taking advantage of his size to creep into other boys’ cherry-bags and steal. His one poor trick of magic is to hang pots upon a sunbeam, his one adventure into romance, a mock-heroic episode at King Arthur’s court.

When Dr. Johnson “withdrew his attention” from the great man who bored him and “thought about Tom Thumb”, the escape was not from dull facts into a world of dreams, but from the pedantry of words into a simple realism.

Given a little creature in a land of giants, Tom’s experiences are strictly logical. He stands on the edge of a bowl in which his mother is mixing batter, and falls in. When his mother goes milking, she ties him to a thistle, and he is swallowed by a cow. A raven that spies him walking in a furrow carries him off “even like a grain of corn”.

As for his life at Court, there is example for it, “Tom being a dwarf”; nor was he the first mischief-maker to find his way there, nor the first poor man’s son that overcame his betters. But his method of attack was new; no champion in the annals of romance had beaten Sir Launcelot, Sir Tristram and Sir Guy with no other weapon than a laugh.

At Court, Tom bears himself as to the manner born; wears the King’s signet for a girdle, creeps nimbly into the royal button-hole, and finds a place, sooner than most courtiers, “near his Highness heart”. At home, he is still the gentle scapegrace beloved of village folk. If he craves a boon of the King, it is to relieve the wants of his parents: and the boon,

“as much of silver coin

As well his arms could hold”,

amounts to the great sum of threepence,

“A heavy burden which did make

His weary limbs to crack.”

There is a kind of natural magic in all this that a child can grasp without the help of a magician. Tom Thumb although he is wingless, can wear a fairy dress: an oak-leaf hat, a spider-woven shirt, hose and doublet of thistle-down and

“shoes made of a mouse’s skin

And tann’d most curiously”.

Small creatures that creep among grass-blades seem to have furnished the rhymer with analogies. Tom’s house is but half a mile from the court, yet he takes two days and nights to make the journey; he sleeps in a walnut-shell, and his parents feast him three days upon a hazel-nut,

“that was sufficient for a month

For this great man to eat”.

“A few moist April drops” are enough to delay his return, till his “careful father” takes a “birding trunk” and with a single blast, blows him back to court.

Last comes the notable account of his death, which tells how the doctors examined him through “a fine perspective glass” and found—

“His face no bigger than an ant’s,

Which hardly could be seen”.

The rhyme is a dwarf epic, perhaps begun by some child that had found an ant-hill, or a thistle taller than himself; carried on, with a phrase here and a picture there from older tales, by the “careful father”, who set it to the unequal beat of little feet at his side.

But no child could endure the unhappy end. A second part and a third (both sorry imitations of the first) brought the “little knight” back to fresh adventures; and even the printers of instructive books understood the value of his name on a title-page.

Catskin,[22] long forgotten through the more glorious transformations of her French sister, could hold Dr. Primrose’s children with the old theme of disguise and changing fortune. Five parts in verse gave her whole history: how she was banished, like Cordelia, by an angry father; how she disguised herself in a hood of Catskin, and took service in a great house; how (following here the very print of the Glass Slipper) she went to the ball and danced with a Knight; and how, one day when she forgot her Catskin hood, the Knight, discovering her “in rich attire”, fell in love with her and married her.