PREFACE. For the guidance and principle by which the ensuing contents are brought forward, I refer to the four prefaces contained in the first of the two volumes of the second edition of this Essay. However distinct in appearance, the primitive and now usual form may be to the eye, the enunciation or sound, adopting the then pronunciation of our language, will be found identical, and is the real clue to their true import, at least as far as regards customary colloquial phrases and terms. But on the sccro of Nursery Rhymes, as they are now called, the unparallelled corruption of verbal intercommunication, from circumstances (as well as time) peculiar to our country, has afforded our Friarhood of a subsequent day a mean to muffle up, in a precise indentity of sound, terms, either carrying no rational import in connection, or else one utterly irrelevant to the original sense, and was intended by this crafty tool of the Pope, then established here, to obliterate, or at least disarm of danger, this popular and bitter display of the disgust of the naturally and truly religious Heathen Saxon at having a greedy, and to him heretical mountebank, imposed upon him. In the smothering of these pungent, and then truly favourite and popular satyrisings of this tool of superstition, |