Choyce Drollery: Songs and Sonnets: Being a Collection of Divers Excellent Pieces of Poetry, of Several Eminent Authors.
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Choyce Drollery: Songs and Sonnets: Being a Collection of Divers Excellent Pieces of Poetry, of Several Eminent Authors.
English poetry -- Early modern, 1500-1700; English wit and humor; Songs, English -- Texts
“_I will get a good Master, if any good Master wou’d_
_Get me; I cannot tell what to do else, by my soul, that_
_I cannot; for I have went and gone to one LILLY’S;_
_He lives at that house, at the end of another house,_
_By the ~May-pole~ house; and tells every body by one_
_Star, and t’other Star, what good luck they shall have._
_But he cou’d not tell nothing for poor ~Teg~._”
(_The Committee_, Act i.)
Verse 12. The Master of the Rolls. This was Sir Dudley Digges, builder
of Chilham Castle, near Canterbury, Kent, who had in 1627 moved the
impeachment of the Duke of Buckingham, and been rewarded with this
Mastership.
Verse 18. Alludes to the rigorous suppression of the Play-houses (_vide
ante_ p. 285, for a descriptive Song); and as we see from verse 17,
the Bear-garden, like Rope-dancers and Tumblers, met more tolerance
than actors (except from Colonel Pride). Not heels were feared, but
heads and hands. Bears, moreover, could not stir up men to loyalty, but
tragedy-speeches might. One Joshua Gisling, a Roundhead, kept bears at
Paris Garden, Southwark.
23. “Goodman _Lenthall_,” “neither wise nor witty,” (“that creeps to the
house by a backdoor,” _Rump_, ii. 185,) the Speaker of the Commons from
1640 to 1653; Alderman _Allen_, the dishonest and bankrupt goldsmith,
both rebuked by _Cromwell_, when he forcibly expelled the Rump. (See the
ballad on pp. 62-5 of _M. D., C._, verses 9 and 10, telling how “_Allen_
the coppersmith was in great fear. He had done as [i.e. _us_] much hurt,”
&c.; also 2, 15, for the dumb-foundered “Speaker without his Mace.”) This
Downfall of the Rump had been on April 20th, 1653, not quite three months
before the funeral of _Dean_. Whoever may have been the writer of this
spirited ballad, we believe, wrote the other one also: judging solely by
internal evidence.
24. _Henry Ireton_, who married Bridget Cromwell in January, 1646-7,
and escaped from the Royalists after having been captured at Naseby,
proved the worst foe of Charles, insatiably demanding his death, died
in Ireland of the plague, 15th November, 1651. His body was brought to
Bristol in December, and lay in state at Somerset House. Over the gate
hung the “hatchment” with “_Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori_”—which
one of the Cavaliers delightedly translated, “Good it is for his country
that he is dead.” Like Dean’s, two years later, Ireton’s body was buried
with ostentatious pomp in Henry VII.’s Chapel, (Feb. 6 or 7;) to be
ignominiously treated at Tyburn after the Restoration. The choice of so
royal a resting-place brought late insult on many another corpse. His
widow was speedily married to Charles Fleetwood, before June, 1652.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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