Nursery Rhymes, metrical jingles transmitted in folklore and mechanically repeated by children at their play, without knowledge of their significance or origin. Being in verse form they are easily preserved, either as mere traditional rhymes, or as formulas to be used in games; and, as unconscious survivals of a remote antiquity, they not infrequently preserve for the scientific inquirer fragments of ancient incantations for healing diseases or revealing the future, and invocations combined with ceremonial observances, while the intimate nature of the religious conceptions involved points back unmistakably to a mediæval origin. Children with all their inventiveness and imagination are slaves of the letter, and most of their game-formulas are handed down from generation to generation along with the games themselves. In their characteristic directness, point, and quaintness of phrase, they defy imitation, and in their faculty of arresting the imagination from age to age they reveal the instinct of perpetuity. Many of them are beyond doubt survivals among children of May games, ring-songs and dances, rounds, and kissing games which in old England were played by grown-up people, and these of the higher grades of society. And Mr Newell has proved that many of these are still current in America which are now forgotten in the mother-country, although they not infrequently have equivalents on the continent of Europe.
Under the same general head we include nursery rhymes proper, and counting-out rhymes (to decide who shall begin a game), cumulative rhymes, courting and love games, playing at work, flower oracles, and riddle and guessing games; while on the other hand popular mottoes, old saws and maxims relating to husbandry, the weather, or the like, and all the wealth of local rhymes and sayings belong to the popular rhymes of folklore generally. The verses usually consist either of a rhyming couplet, or of four lines in which the second and fourth rhyme; they are often accompanied by a refrain, which may be a single added line, or may be made up of two lines inserted into the stanza; and in place of exact consonance, any assonance, or similarity of sound, will answer for the rhyme.
See FOLKLORE, PROVERBS, and RIDDLES; also J. O. Halliwell's Nursery Rhymes of England (1842; 6th ed. 1860); R. Chambers, Popular Rhymes of Scotland (1842); E. Rolland, Rimes et Jeux de l'Enfance (Paris, 1883); and especially W. Wells Newell's admirable Games and Songs of American Children (New York, 1884), the best work of its class, and a contribution of the first importance to scientific folklore. Appended is a list of sixty-five works bearing on the subject.