Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III RHYMES AND POPULAR SONGS N looking more closely at the contents of our nursery collections, we find that a large proportion of so-called nursery rhymes are songs or snatches of songs, which are preserved also as broadsides, or appeared in printed form in early song-books. These songs or parts of songs were included in nursery collections because they happened to be current at the time when these collections were made, and later compilers transferred into their own collections what they found in earlier ones. Many songs are preserved in a number of variations, for popular songs are in a continual state of transformation. Sometimes new words are written to the old tune, and differ from those that have gone before in all but the rhyming words at the end of the lines; sometimes new words are introduced which entirelychange the old meaning. Many variations of songs are born of the moment, and would pass away with it, were it not that they happen to be put into writing and thereby escape falling into oblivion. In Mother Goose's Melody stands a song in six verses which begins :— There was a little man who woo'd a little maid, And he said : " Little maid, will you wed, wed, wed ? I have little more to say, will you ? Aye or nay ? For little said is soonest mended, ded, ded." (1799, p. 46.) HalliwelTs collection includes only the first and the fourth verse of this piece. (1842, p. 24.) In the estimation of Chappell this song was a very popular ballad, which was sung to the tune of / am the Duke of Norfolk, or Paul's Steeple It appears also in the Fairing or Golden Toy for Children of all Sizes and Denominations of 1781, where it is designated as "a new love song by the poets of Great Britain." Its words form a variation of the song called The Dumb Maid, w...