There was another village poet who flourished in the same epoch as the Jim cited above. His name was Rab Downe. He had a remarkable facility for running off impromptu verses. On one occasion at a wrestling match, he began swinging himself from foot to foot, and to a chant--these fellows always sing their verses--described the match as it went on before him, versifying all the turns and incidents of the struggle, throwing in words relative to the onlookers, their names and complementary expletives. No doubt that much of the compositions of these men was mere doggerel, but it was not always so. In their songs gleam out here and there a poetic, or, at all events, a fresh and quaint thought. What is always difficult to ascertain is what is original and what traditional, for when they do pretend to originality they often import into their verses whole passages from ancient ballads. But in this they are not peculiar. Hindley in his _Life of James Catnach_, the Broadside publisher, gives some verses on the death of the Princess Charlotte, which Catnach claimed as his own composition. The first verse runs-- "She is gone! sweet Charlotte's gone, Gone to the silent bourne; She is gone, she's gone for ever more,-- She never can return." But this was a mere adaptation of a song of _The Drowned Lover_, which is a favourite with the old singers-- "He is gone! my love is drowned! My love whom I deplore. He is gone! he's gone! I never, No I never shall see him more." Catnach corruscated into brilliant originality in the next stanza-- "She is gone with her joy--her darling boy, The son of Leopold, blythe and keen; She Died the sixth of November, Eighteen hundred and seventeen." There is nothing like this in the original _Drowned Lover_ that influenced the opening of his elegy. "Catnach," says Mr. Hindley--the italics are his own--"_made_ the following lines _out of his own head_!" Our village bards never reached a lower bathos. The reader may perhaps like to hear the story of the lives of some of these old fellows.