Lavender's Blue. A Book of Nursery Rhymes. Compiled by Kathleen
Lines and pictured by Harold Jones. (O.U.P. 15s.) ONCE upon a time a Professor of German Philology absent-mindedly brought his Welsh nooks to his class in Old Irish. He dived through a word, he became lost in its nlYthological content, and, returning to earth, he remarked sighingly to his entranced class (composed mostly of professors of English iltdolugy): `To wander into folklore that way madness.' Madness, therefore, to ask this beautiful and satisfying book the many scholarly questions that an assemblage of nursery rhYMes—the very stuff of folklore—pro- Vokes, particularly when many of the 150 ere folksongs lacking their tunes, counting rhymes, riddles,,or songs that have become Popular but are no part of folklore. At what date, for instance, did the familiar WY passengers leave The Three Ships that Come sailing by? , Pedantry aside, a rich comprehensiveness Is something for which to give thanks. Harold Jones's illustrations, best in colour, fully express the richness of the collection as they frame each page. Although stylised, leseY have the precision that children love, and they are every whit as perennially English as Boutet de Monvel's were French, dignity and absurdity often combined as in the cats whose inscrutability is reminiscent of Queen Nefertiti.
'The Twelve Days of Christmas' is printed ingeniously so as to avoid repetition; 'The Bells of St. Clement's' is framed in a frieze of the loved London spires: Gooscy Gooscy Gander wanders through a house like a doll's house, without a front; but detailed excellences are so many that it would be possible to go on for a long time —and that way is madness.
K. G.
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