Now am I nothing but torments possessing, Thou in thy life-time didst dearly adore me, Love, i'le lye down in the Grave with thee: when I'm with Nelly, my own dear heart. [Printer's name cut off. Black-letter. Date, 1685-8. For tune, see p. 453: "The Despairing Lover's Address to Charon," &c., Douce Coll., i. 58.] Page 167. A True Sense of Sorrow. "It was not for nothing," say the good wives, "that my nose bled yesterday at sundown; that the cat sneezed thrice; that the pig came round the corner with a straw in his mouth; that a winding-sheet grew in the candle, a stranger fluttered from the bars, a coal flew out and burnt a hole in the hearth-rug, and Jenny saw the new moon through the window-pane without turning any of her money!" Certainly not: and it was not for anything less that we felt a superstitious creeping and crawling ought to attend the devout perusal of our Bagford Ballad, concerning the pious tribulation of the Poor Yorkshireman; so that we were almost disappointed at the benevolent stranger failing to be stript of disguise and revealed as a visitor from another and a hotter world. We put faith in our instincts, for they rarely deceive us. We never struggled to overcome our first repugnances without seeing reason thereafter to repent having trusted persons, against whom innate antagonisms warned us to beware. We have since found out all about the Yorkshireman; in time to assure Ballad-Society members that it is a case of gross imposition. He did not even belong to Yorkshire: indeed, he never appeared sufficiently 'cute to spring from those extensive Ridings, where hospitality to strangers and over-reaching of horse-buyers are equally encouraged. If he ever existed at all, which is doubtful, he was only a miserable Essex man at best; and it was the Foul Fiend who mocked him, by bestowing on him a bag of money which proved to be nothing but withered oak-leaves (it always looked more like a race of hoax than of ledger). The Evil One kept tempting him, quite unnecessarily, to murder his wife, who had a pair of kids upon her hands. They only needed to be left alone to die of their own accord. In brief: we here gain another proof of the unscrupulous roguery characterizing that very demonstratively "Protestant" publisher Jonah Deacon (see p. 590, and pass him). We know that Robert Pocock licensed the ballad between 1685 and 1688. It was stolen, in the most unblushing manner, from the first part of another, published fully sixty years earlier by Henry Gosson; not only to the same tune, but nearly identical in words, so far as the copy was made. The original is in two parts, and of 184 lines. It is entitled, "A New Ballad, shewing the great misery sustained by a poore man in Essex, his wife and children, with other strange things done by the Devill. To the tune of the Rich Merchantman." It begins, After all, this affords an example of the publishers' tricks by which ballads were re-issued, a little altered to suit changes of taste and fluctuations in the market: crambe bis cocta. (The above cut is in Gosson's ballad, Roxb. Coll., i. 286. One holds a large purse for small mercies. Notice the Tempter's leer of private life!) Pages 189, 209, 872. Thanks to the liberality of The Early English Text Society (which has done such good work since 1863, and is ready to do more if increasingly supported), we are enabled to enrich our pages by adding such woodcuts from Harman's Caueat for Commen Corsetors, 1567, as illustrate the subject of professional beggars and impostors. The first is a double representation of Nicolas Blount, in his holiday attire, when he lived freely among the morts and dells, a gay spark and amorous, "an Upright Man," according to the lingo of the Canting tribe which term Awdeley explains as, "One that goeth wyth the trunchion of a staffe, which staffe they cal a Filtchman. This man is of so much authority, that meeting with any of his profession, he may cal them to accompt, & comaund a share or snap vnto himselfe, of al that thay have gained by their trade in one moneth. [No "honesty among th.... s."] And if he doo them wrong, they haue no remedy agaynst hym, no though he beate them, as he vseth comonly to do. He may also comaund any of their women, which they cal Doxies, to serue his turne. He hath ye chiefe place at any market walke, & other assemblies, & is not of any to be controled."-The Fraternitye of Vacabondes, 1575. The same picture shows him in his professional "undress," as a "Counterfeit Cranke," or Shamming Sick-man, under the alias of Nicolas Genynges. The single staff for the two is a neat artistic touch. Evil days sometimes strip his holiday plumes from him. We find this "hendy Nicholas" (not Chaucer's, who as well deserved it') exposed in the Pillory, in the next engraving. The absence of discernible features lower than the eyelids (which are closed in modest bashfulness, or for other sufficient reasons), is suggestive of the crowd having already indulged in tributary dues of mud or incipient chickens. The authoritative beadles shrink into diminutive minniken beside the stalwart hero of the civic triumph. It was sometimes part of the sentence that the term of exposure was divided, so that the culprit might be turned in different directions for each quarter of an hour. This was done to give an opportunity to every portion of the expectant crowd to see the object of regard, and "have a shy," or as our moderns say, "hull half a brick at him." What a thing it is to possess a "paternal government," thoughtful of popular enjoyment! Behold him enthroned. 1 Chaucer's Nicholas received about as warm a salute as it is possible for any one to obtain; of the two he would have preferred the pillory. But it was the colophon, not the title-page, of the volume that suffered.* |