The gentleman comes not to show us his satin, To look with some judgment at him that speaks Latin, To be angry with him that marks not his clothes, To answer 'O Lord, Sir' and talk play-book oaths, And at the next bear-baiting (full of his sack) 40 To tell his comrades our discipline's slack; _And so the Commencement grows new._ We have no prevaricator's wit. Ay, marry sir, when have you had any yet? Besides no serious Oxford man comes To cry down the use of jesting and hums. Our ballad (believe 't) is no stranger than true; Mum Salter is sober, and Jack Martin too, _And so the Commencement grows new._ [_How the Commencement, &c._, belongs to the same group as the _Mark Antony_ poems and _Square-Cap_, and there is the same ambiguity between four anapaests and five iambs. You would certainly take line 1 as it stands in _1677_ with ''Tis' for 'It is', and probably as it stands here, for a heroic if line 2 did not come to undeceive you. And this line 2 is bad as either. First printed in _1653_. MS. copies are found in Rawlinson MS. Poet. 147, pp. 48-9, and Tanner MS. 465, fol. 83, of the Bodleian. Neither copy is good, but each helps to restore the text (see ll. 18 and 38). The Tanner MS. also has on fol. 44 an indignant poem 'Upon Mr. Cl. who made a Song against the DD^{rs}', beginning Leave off, vain Satirist, and do not think, To stain our reverend purple with thy ink. It adds the interesting evidence that the poem became a popular song at Cambridge: Must gitterns now and fiddles be made fit, Be tuned and keyed to sweake [?squeak] a Johnian wit? Must now thy poems be made fidlers' notes, Puffed with Tobacco through their sooty throats? . . . . . . . . . . Are thy strong lines and mighty cart-rope things Now spun so small, they'll twist on fiddle strings? Canst thou prove Ballad-poet of the times? Can thy proud fancy stoop to penny rimes? (This latter information, as to MSS., is Mr. Simpson's.)] [Line: 5 out] but _1653_.] [Line: 9 forty pound] Still the regular doctorate fee, though relatively three or four times heavier then than now.] [Line: 10 stammel] Properly a stuff; but, as generally or often red in colour, the colour itself.] [Line: 11 I am not certain of the meaning of this line though I could conjecture.] [Line: 13 nor t'other for speeches] _MS._ 'that for his breeches'.] [Line: 15 _1677_ inserts 'the' before 'teaching', but the absence of the article is much more characteristic.] [Line: 18 The 'Vindicators', in the new bondage of grammar, 'come'.