But others come perilously near mere versified moralising.  Lewis Carroll’s nonsense verses in the two famous Alice books are supreme among their kind; but are they not sometimes just a shade too ingenious, or too adult in wit?  Probably Stevenson, in those seemingly artless poems in A Child’s Book of Verse, comes nearest to a level perfection.  Who has ever approached him in his power to understand and express the small child’s world, desires and delights, without a trace of the grown-up’s condescension or self-consciousness?

Well, these great ones are no longer in the world; yet, with the recognition of their genius, there is the usual danger of bemoaning the lack of worthy successors.  Not but what there is some excuse for such lamentation; for this reason that every Christmas there is a veritable flood of children’s verse, a great deal of which is either painfully didactic, painfully sentimental, painfully funny or painfully foolish.

What I wish to do at the moment is to call attention to the fact that there is one man alive in England—­one of many, I do not doubt:  but one at a time!—­who is doing “nonsense verses” for children which are guiltless of all the faults I have indicated above.

Jack Goring is known among some of his friends as “The Jolly Rhymster.”  He writes his verses first for his own children, and then publishes them from time to time for the pleasure of other children.  The secret of his success is partly that he knows that even small children like a story to be an adventure; partly that he understands how their own romances, the things they picture or hum to themselves when well-meaning adults are not worrying them, or rather, trying to amuse them, begin—­wherever they may end!—­with a perfectly tangible object, such as a pillar-box, a rag-doll or a toy locomotive.  One of “The Jolly Rhymster’s” best things begins—­

    “Finger-post, finger-post, why do you stand
     Pointing all day with your silly flat hand?”

—­which is exactly the sort of question that a very small child in all probability does really ask itself when it has seen a finger-post day after day at a cross-roads.  How the poem continues and where it ends you must find out for yourself.  It’s all in a book called The Ballad of Lake Laloo.

In the recently published volume[15] that now lies before me, this telling of a tale of wonder which begins with an ordinary thing is again evident.  Nip and Flip, aged six and four respectively, are the adventurers; and they make three voyages in this little book.  In the first, The Fourpenny-Ha’penny Ship, they circumnavigate the world.  Now please note how Mr Goring strikes the right note at the very outset: 

    “Nip and Flip
     Took a holiday trip
     On a beautiful fourpenny-ha’penny ship
     With a dear little handkerchief sail;
     And they sang, ’Yo ho! 
     We shall certainly go
     To the end of the world and back, you know,
     And capture the great Seakale.’”