“To show them how each Fingle-fangle,
    On which they doting are, their souls entangle,
    As with a Web, a Trap, a Gin, or Snare. 
    While by their Play-things, I would them entice,
    To mount their Thoughts from what are childish Toys
    To Heaven for that’s prepar’d for Girls and Boys. 
    Nor do I so confine myself to these
    As to shun graver things, I seek to please,
    Those more compos’d with better things than Toys: 
    Tho thus I would be catching Girls and Boys.”

In the seventy-four Meditations composing this curious medley—­“tho but in Homely Rhimes”—­upon subjects familiar to any little girl or boy, none leaves the moral to the imagination.  Nevertheless, it could well have been a relaxation, after the daily drill in “A B abs” and catechism, to turn the leaves and to spell out this: 

    UPON THE FROG

    The Frog by nature is both damp and cold,
    Her mouth is large, her belly much will hold,
    She sits somewhat ascending, loves to be
    Croaking in gardens tho’ unpleasantly.

   Comparison

    The hypocrite is like unto this frog;
    As like as is the Puppy to the Dog. 
    He is of nature cold, his mouth is wide
    To prate, and at true Goodness to deride.

Doubtless, too, many little Puritans quite envied the child in “The Boy and the Watchmaker,” a jingle wherein the former said, among other things: 

   “This Watch my Father did on me bestow
    A Golden one it is, but ’twill not go,
    Unless it be at an Uncertainty;
    I think there is no watch as bad as mine. 
    Sometimes ’tis sullen, ’twill not go at all,
    And yet ’twas never broke, nor had a fall.”

The same small boys may even have enjoyed the tedious explanation of the mechanism of the time-piece given by the Watchmaker, and after skipping the “Comparison” (which made the boy represent a convert and the watch in his pocket illustrative of “Grace within his Heart"), they probably turned eagerly to the next Meditation Upon the Boy and his Paper of Plumbs.  Weather-cocks, Hobby-horses, Horses, and Drums, all served Bunyan in his effort “to point a moral” while adorning his tales.

In a later edition of these grotesque and quaint conceptions, some alterations were made and a primer was included.  It then appeared as “A Book for Boys and Girls; or Temporal Things Spiritualized;” and by the time the ninth edition was reached, in seventeen hundred and twenty-four, the book was hardly recognizable as “Divine Emblems; or Temporal Things Spiritualized.”