Part 2 (1/2)

”What is the rhyme for porringer?” was written on occasion of the marriage of Mary, the daughter of James Duke of York, afterwards James II., with the young Prince of Orange: and the following alludes to William III. and George Prince of Denmark:

William and Mary, George and Anne, Four such children had never a man: They put their father to flight and shame, And call'd their brother a shocking bad name.

Another nursery song on King William is not yet obsolete, but its application is not generally known. My authority is the t.i.tle of it in MS. Harl. 7316:

As I walk'd by myself, And talked to myself, Myself said unto me, Look to thyself, Take care of thyself, For n.o.body cares for thee.

I answer'd myself, And said to myself In the self-same repartee, Look to thyself, Or not look to thyself, The self-same thing will be.

To this cla.s.s of rhymes I may add the following on Dr. Sacheverel, which was obtained from oral tradition:

Doctor Sacheverel Did very well, But Jacky Dawbin Gave him a warning.

When there are no allusions to guide us, it is only by accident that we can hope to test the history and antiquity of these kind of sc.r.a.ps, but we have no doubt whatever that many of them are centuries old. The following has been traced to the time of Henry VI., a singular doggerel, the joke of which consists in saying it so quickly that it cannot be told whether it is English or gibberish:

In fir tar is, In oak none is, In mud eel is, In clay none is, Goat eat ivy, Mare eat oats.

”Multiplication is vexation,” a painful reality to schoolboys, was found a few years ago in a ma.n.u.script dated 1570; and the memorial lines, ”Thirty days hath September,” occur in the Return from Parna.s.sus, an old play printed in 1606. Our own reminiscences of such matters, and those of Shakespeare, may thus have been identical! ”To market, to market, to buy a plum-bun,” is partially quoted in Florio's New World of Words, 1611, in v. 'Abomba.' The old song of the ”Carrion Crow sat on an Oak,”

was discovered by me in MS. Sloane 1489, of the time of Charles I., but under a different form:

Hic, hoc, the carrion crow, For I have shot something too low: I have quite missed my mark, And shot the poor sow to the heart; Wife, bring treacle in a spoon, Or else the poor sow's heart will down.

”Sing a song of sixpence” is quoted by Beaumont and Fletcher. ”Buz, quoth the blue fly,” which is printed in the nursery halfpenny books, belongs to Ben Jonson's Masque of Oberon; the old ditty of ”Three Blind Mice” is found in the curious music book ent.i.tled Deuteromelia, or the Second Part of Musicke's Melodie, 1609; and the song, ”When I was a little girl, I wash'd my mammy's dishes,” is given by Aubrey in MS.

Lansd. 231. ”A swarm of bees in May,” is quoted by Miege, 1687. And so on of others, fragments of old catches and popular songs being constantly traced in the apparently unmeaning rhymes of the nursery.

Most of us have heard in time past the school address to a story-teller:

Liar, liar, lick dish, Turn about the candlestick.

Not very important lines, one would imagine, but they explain a pa.s.sage in Chettle's play of the Tragedy of Hoffman, or a Revenge for a Father, 4to. Lond, 1631, which would be partially inexplicable without such a.s.sistance:

_Lor._ By heaven! it seemes hee did, but all was vaine; The flinty rockes had cut his tender scull, And the rough water wash't away his braine.

_Luc._ Lyer, lyer, licke dis.h.!.+

The intention of the last speaker is sufficiently intelligible, but a future editor, anxious to investigate his author minutely, might search in vain for an explanation of _licke dish_. Another instance[8] of the antiquity of children's rhymes I met with lately at Stratford-on-Avon, in a MS. of the seventeenth century, in the collection of the late Captain James Saunders, where, amongst common-place memoranda on more serious subjects, written about the year 1630, occurred a version of one of our most favorite nursery songs:

I had a little bonny nagg, His name was Dapple Gray; And he would bring me to an ale-house A mile out of my way.

[Footnote 8: A dance called _Hey, diddle, diddle_, is mentioned in the play of _King Cambises_, written about 1561, and the several rhymes commencing with the words may have been original adaptations to that dance-tune.]

”Three children sliding on the ice” is founded on a metrical tale published at the end of a translation of Ovid de Arte Amandi, 1662.[9]

The lines,

There was an old woman Liv'd under a hill, And if she ben't gone, She lives there still-

[Footnote 9: See the whole poem in my Nursery Rhymes of England, ed. 1842, p. 19.]

form part of an old catch, printed in the Academy of Complements, ed.

1714, p. 108. The same volume (p. 140) contains the original words to another catch, which has been corrupted in its pa.s.sage to the nursery:

There was an old man had three sons, Had three sons, had three sons; There was an old man had three sons, Jeffery, James, and Jack.

Jeffery was hang'd and James was drown'd, And Jack was lost, that he could not be found, And the old man fell into a swoon, For want of a cup of sack!

It is not improbable that Shakespeare, who has alluded so much and so intricately to the vernacular rural literature of his day, has more notices of nursery-rhymes and tales than research has. .h.i.therto elicited.