Dance Thumbkin

In the *Book of Nursery Rhymes*, published by the Percy Society, there is a small error of importance, involving no less that the learned would call "a non sequitur," and which, if my correct-and-almost-unequalled nurse, Betty Richins, was alive, she would have noticed much sooner that the nurseling who now addresses you. (She died about the year 1796.) In the valuable and still popular nursery classical song, "Dance Thumbkin, dance," it is not only an error to say "Thumbkin *he can* dance alone" (let any one reader of the "NOTES AND QUERIES," male or female, *only try*), but it is not the cor…