Most Popular Books by Walter Jerrold

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1850 Edition.

Here are some more stories from the wonderful Annals of Fairyland. How they were first told at the Court of King Oberon, and how they came to be recorded you will learn at the beginning, and much as you love the little people you will, I think, like them even better when you have learned all that this volume has to tell. Mr William Canton has told you the stories properly belonging to “The Reign of King Herla,” Mr J. M. Gibbon showed you how a famous merry old soul and his court found entertainment in story-telling in “The Reign of King Cole,” and now it is my pleasant privilege to put before you, from the inexhaustible Annals, those tales which properly belong to “The Reign of King Oberon.” Of course you may have already met some of these stories before, for most of our best writers have been made free of Fairyland and have written of the wonderful things they learned there; Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm have long since been famous for all that they have told of their visits to the marvellous land, and some of the stories which they brought back will be found to belong to the reign of Oberon and Titania, while others have been told by Ben Jonson, by Thomas Hood, by Charles Perrault, by Thomas Crofton Croker, by Douglas Jerrold, by Benjamin Thorpe and by Sir George Dasent—but old or new all have the perennial youthfulness of the fairies themselves, and as long as we can truly enjoy them we shall not grow old. In all the annals of Fairyland nothing is more wonderful—and the annals are found in many hundreds of volumes—than that chapter which tells of the reign of the true fairy King Oberon and his beautiful wife Titania, who is sometimes called Queen Mab. Marvellous are the doings of Oberon’s little subjects in every land—good fairies and bad fairies, dwarfs, elves and sprites, brownies, pixies and gnomes, pucks, trolls and kobolds and Robin Goodfellow—and marvellous are the tales which have been told of them by travellers in the fairy realms. Now, once upon a time there was sadness throughout the whole kingdom of Oberon—and his kingdom has no boundaries—because of a quarrel which had arisen between the king and the queen. It was a very small matter to begin with, but the king was a king and did not think it consorted with his dignity as such that his will should not be law, while the lovely Queen Titania thought that even the powerful king of the fairies should give way to her wishes. A small Indian prince, a dusky child, son of a mighty monarch of the East, had been stolen and a fairy baby left in its place and King Oberon wanted the changeling to be one of the knights of his train, while Queen Titania insisted on keeping him as one of her pages. Long and bitter was the quarrel but neither king nor queen would give way, and at length they parted and half the fairies marched off under the banner of the king and half under the banner of the queen. Now you know of course that it was the fairies that looked after all things, the flowers and the trees, the streams and lakes, the little birds and beasts, and even—though they might not be aware of it—after the doings of many men and women; thus when it befel that their king and queen quarrelled and all the fairies rallied to their separate courts everything was neglected: the corn died unripened, the grass withered in the fields, so that the flocks and herds starved, the summers were cold and wet, the winters were sickly and mild, and many good men, women and children lost their tempers and became troublesome and unhappy they knew not why, and certainly never imagined that it was all because of a quarrel between the rulers of the world-wide kingdom of Fairy.

Includes 8 illustrations. Field Marshal Horatio Kitchener, 1st Earl of Khartoum still stands as one of the great generals produced by Britain. His career was marked by great deeds, and great controversies. The son of a military family, he trained at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich before his first trip to the Middle East surveying in Palestine in 1874. He joined the newly formed Egyptian Army in 1883, which was in reality controlled by the British, and embarked on campaign in Sudan. He was part of the failed Gordon relief expedition in 1884, and learned a great deal of the area, its people and the military problems of fighting in the arid desert. By 1892 he was Sirdar, head of the Egyptian army, he was given command of the expedition to crush the self-appointed Mahdi who had taken control of large parts of Sudan. It was during this campaign that he gained public and Royal attention after the victories of Atbara and Omdurman that crushed the revolt of the Mahdi. He served as Lord Robert''s second in command during the Boer War and served with distinction and much success, although his institution of concentration camps caused great outrage and awful civilian distress. Perhaps his greatest services were during the First World War, as Secretary of State for War, fashioning a great civilian army to fight the militarised hordes of Germany in France and Flanders. He may have gained even greater fame, but was tragically lost at sea when the H.M.S. Hampshire was torpedoed in 1916. An excellent short biography.

This republication of "The Big Book of Nursery Rhymes," newly arranged to best display the rhymes and their original illustrations, while maintaining the original pagination, is intended to reintroduce the nursery rhymes of a century past to the children of today. Nursery rhymes carry fragments of the history, culture, religion, and ideas of the 15th or 16th through the 19th Centuries, which should be preserved and passed on to new generations. Parents and children will love reading these rhymes, and will delight in the wonderful illustrations. Originally Edited by Walter Jerrold. Illustrated by Charles Robinson. Published by Blackie and Son, Ltd., London, 1920. From the Introduction: "The very title, Nursery Rhymes, which has come to be associated with a great body of familiar verse, is in itself sufficient indication of the manner in which that verse has been passed down from generation to generation. Who composed the little pieces it is, save in a few cases, impossible to say: some are certainly very old and were doubtless repeated thousands of times before their first appearance in print. References to certain favourites may be found in the pages of the dramatists of Elizabeth''s time. "Attempts are sometimes made to read into these Rhymes a deeper significance than the obvious and simple one which has accounted for their enduring popularity in the Nursery, but this volume has no concern with such profound interpretations, any more than have the little people who love the old jingles best. "Students divide our rhymes into narrative pieces, historical, folk-lore, game rhymes, counting-out rhymes, jingles, fragments, and so forth, but for the children for whom and by whom they are remembered, and for whose sake they are here collected and pictured anew, they are just-Nursery Nursery Rhymes." Caution to Parents: Nursery rhymes that were acceptable for children of the 19th Century might prove confusing or unsettling for children of the 21st Century, so far removed in tiome from the manners and issues of that time; parents are encouraged to read these rhymes with their children.

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1913 Edition.

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