An affectionate little elegy for a man remembered mainly for his long brown coat, buttoned down the front. It states his death plainly in the opening line, so it is one to know about before reading aloud.
From Mother Goose / Nursery Rhymes (traditional). See the whole collection.
Old Grimes is dead, that good old man,
We ne'er shall see him more;
He used to wear a long brown coat
All buttoned down before.
About this rhyme
Albert Gorton Greene (1802-1868) wrote 'Old Grimes' around 1822, as a young student, and it became widely reprinted.
This little verse is a fragment of a much longer poem. An American, Albert Gorton Greene, wrote 'Old Grimes' as a young man in the early 1820s, a mock elegy for a fictional good old soul, and it was reprinted and parodied so often it drifted loose from its author and into nursery collections as this small, solemn-sounding scrap.
Public domain. Text from The Real Mother Goose (Blanche Fisher Wright, 1916), via Project Gutenberg. View the source edition