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- the very small fry - The rhyming
is so primitive, the provocation to
smiling and laughter is so thoroughly
unconscious, the personality so
egotistically natural, that these naive
attempts come straight home to
our common nature: - the simple
egoism makes their interest widely
inclusive. Some of them are as
deliciously human as Falstaff himself,
far removed as they may be from
him intellectually, and some of them are as asinine as Bottom the Weaver.

Why collect such common
effusions? Why collect "such stuff and rot"
as the art for art sake or purely literary critic has been
known to call it? The answer
is, that the books are of Bibliographical
interest, often representing the earliest
output of the Canadian village
printing-press, - their primary
attempts at book making. Having

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