Thanks be to the worthy bookseller, George Thomason,[8] for prudence in laying aside the “tall copy” of this amusing book, from which we make our transcript of text and engraving. Probably it did not exceed two shillings, in price; (at least, we have seen that Anthony à Wood’s uncropt copy of “_Merry Drollery_,” 1661, is marked in contemporary manuscript at “1s. 3d.,” each part). The title says:— _These witty Poems, though sometime [they]_ _may seem to halt on crutches,_ _Yet they’l all merrily please you_ _for your charge, which not much is._ Who was the “N. D.” to whose light labours we are indebted for the compounding of these “Witty Ballads, jovial Songs, and merry Catches” in Pills warranted to cure the ills of Melancholy, had not hitherto been ascertained[9]; or whether he wrote anything beside the above couplet, and the humorous address To the Reader, beginning, _There’s no Purge ’gainst ~Melancholy~,_ _But with ~Bacchus~ to be jolly:_ _All else are but dreggs of Folly, &c._ (p. 111.) As we suspected (flowing though his verse might be), he was more of bookseller than ballad-maker. His injunctions for us to “be wise and _buy_, not _borrow_,” had a terribly tradesman-like sound. Yet he was right. Book-borrowing is an evil practice; and book-lending is not much better. Woeful chasms, in what should be the serried ranks of our Library companions, remind us pathetically, in too many cases (book-cases, especially,) of some Coleridge-like “lifter” of Lambs, who made a raid upon our borders, and carried off plunder, sometimes an unique quarto, on other days an irrecoverable duodecimo: With Schiller, we bewail the departed,— “_The beautiful is vanished, and returns not._” The title of “_Pills to Purge Melancholy_” was by Playford and Tom D’Urfey afterwards employed, and kept alive before the public, in many a volume from before 1684 until 1720, if not later. Whether “N. D.” himself were the “Mer[cury] Melancholicus” whose name appears as printer, for the book to be “sold in London and Westminster,” is to us not doubtful. By April 18, 1661,[10] Thomason had secured his copy, and there need be no question that it was for sport, and not through any fear of rigid censorship or malicious pettifogging interference by the law, that, instead of printer’s name, this pseudonym or nickname was adopted.