“Now that our country towns are become mere outlying suburbs of cities, these remarks may be read with a smile at the rude simplicity of old-fashioned American life.  But the laugh should be directed, not at our own country, but at the bygone age.  It must be remembered that in mediaeval Europe, and in England till the end of the seventeenth century, a kiss was the usual salutation of a lady to a gentleman whom she wished to honor....  The Portuguese ladies who came to England with the Infanta in 1662 were not used to the custom; but, as Pepys says, in ten days they had ‘learnt to kiss and look freely up and down.’  Kissing in games was, therefore, a matter of course, in all ranks....

“In respectable and cultivated French society, at the time of which we speak, the amusements, not merely of young people but of their elders as well, were every whit as crude.

“Madame Celnart, a recognized authority on etiquette, compiled in 1830 a very curious complete manual of society games recommending them as recreation for business men....  ‘Their varying movement,’ she says, ’their diversity, the gracious and gay ideas which these games inspire, the decorous caresses which they permit, all this combines to give real amusement.  These caresses can alarm neither modesty nor prudence, since a kiss in honor given and taken before numerous witnesses is often an act of propriety.’”

The old ballads and nursery rhymes doubtless had much of innocence and freshness in them, but they only come to us nowadays tainted by the odors of city streets.  The pleasure and poetry of the original essence are gone, and vulgarity reigns triumphant.  If you listen to the words of the games which children play in school yards, on sidewalks, and in the streets on pleasant evenings, you will find that most of them, to say the least, border closely on vulgarity; that they are utterly unsuitable to childhood, notwithstanding that they are played with great glee; that they are, in fine, common, rude, silly, and boorish.  One can never watch a circle of children going through the vulgar inanities of “Jenny O’Jones,” “Say, daughter, will you get up?” “Green Gravel,” or “Here come two ducks a-roving,” without unspeakable shrinking and moral disgust.  These plays are dying out; let them die, for there is a hint of happier things abroad in the air.

The wisest mind of wise antiquity told the riddle of the Sphinx, if having ears to hear we would hear.  “Our youth should be educated in a stricter rule from the first, for if education becomes lawless and the youths themselves become lawless, they can never grow up into well-conducted or meritorious citizens; and the education must begin with their plays.”