One of Newbery’s little books, entitled “Mother Goose’s Melody,” for which he evidently adopted the “Mother Goose” from the title given to the collection of Perrault’s fairy tales, which had by this time begun to be popular in England through a translation published some thirty years before, calls for a few words here, because around it has grown up a legend ascribing the authorship to a Boston lady, Elizabeth Goose, the mother-in-law of Thomas Fleet, the Boston printer. This myth is entirely dispelled, first by the fact that most of the well-known rhymes and jingles in the collection are now known to have originated long before this estimable lady came upon this earthly scene, and next by the connection which has been clearly established in his book on “The Original Mother Goose Melodies,” by Mr. W. H. Whitmore, the city registrar of Boston, between the Boston printed “Mother Goose” and the Newbery editions which preceded it.

Towards the end of the last century books for children enter upon a new and very distinct phase, and a few books were published, fragments of which are favorites to-day. But not yet had the time come for the production of books for children by American authors and with distinctly American characteristics. Our New England children were still “nourishing a youth sublime“ almost exclusively on English food. Of “Eyes and no Eyes,” which belongs to this school and this period, Dr. Holmes says he has never seen anything of the kind half so good. “I advise you,” he said, “if you are a child anywhere under forty-five and do not yet wear glasses, to send for ‘Evenings at Home’ and read that story. For myself, I am always grateful to the writer of it for calling my attention to common things.” Of “The Evenings at Home” school, and of about the same period, were Edgeworth’s “Parents’ Assistant,” Day’s “Sandford and Merton,” Mrs. Trimmer’s “History of the Robins,” Charles and Mary Lamb’s “Mrs. Leicester’s School,” Jane and Ann Taylor’s “Hymns for Infant Minds,” Taylor’s tales and compilations, “Roscoe’s “Butterfly’s Ball” series, and a host of others too numerous to mention, all of which were reprinted in New England in the early years of this century by Munro and Francis, and Brown, Taggart and Chase, of Boston, Farnsworth and Churchill of Windsor, Vermont, S. Babcock of New Haven and many more. At length, however, the impatience felt by New England boys and girls of forever reading books in which so much of the local color was entirely strange to them, began to lead our own writers to turn their attention to this hitherto neglected branch of literature and to set themselves to write books which should not be like those of which Oliver Wendell Holmes writes, “where James was called Jem, not Jim, as we heard it; where naughty schoolboys got through a gap in the hedge to steal Farmer Giles’s red-streaks, instead of shinning over the fence to hook old Daddy Jones’s baldwins; where Hodge used to go to the alehouse for his mug of beer, while we used to see old Joe steering for the grocery to get his glass of rum; where there were larks and nightingales instead of yellowbirds and bobolinks; where the robin was a little domestic bird that fed at table instead of a great fidgety, jerky whooping thrush.”¹