Children's Singing Games. Collected and edited by Alice B. Gomme.
With Illustrations by Winifred Smith. (David Nutt.) —In England the amount of traditional lore of this kind is not very great. The collector finds that the games, accompanied by songs, performed by children, or by grown-up people at " wakes," reduce themselves to variants on a small number of types. Nor is there much direct significance in the words and actions of the game-songs themselves. But since foreign collectors took to including in folk-lore collections the degradations of folk-lore to be found in nursery-lore, and particularly since Mr. Wonell col- lected the songs and games of American children, and demon- strated their traditional character by comparison with European collections, a good deal of attention has been directed to the subject. Mrs. Gomme is a worker in the field, and has made a collection of English song-games in another book. The present little work is a selection of eight of the old forms for the use of children. Tunes are given, and directions for playing, and a modicum of folk-lore is added in the notes. A second series is promised for Christmas, 1894. The present list is :—" When I was a Young Girl," " Jenny Jones," " Green Gravel," " Milking Pails," "Here comes three Dukes a-riding," " Old Roger," We are the Rovers," and " Poor Mary site a-weeping." Doubtless the next generation of children up and down the country will learn this canonical version, and the old queer local corruptions and oral traditions, gradually dying out, will give place to a book. That is better than losing the songs, for to an imaginative child the vague images of those snatches are more provoking than the neat ideas of new-made songs ; and the forms of them, tried on the lips of generations, slip easily like polished pebbles. Miss Smith's decorations are prettily designed after the manner of Mr. Crane and Miss Greenaway.
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