"You maidens pretty In country and city With pity hear, My mournful tale; A maid confounded, In sorrow drownded, And deeply wounded, With grief and pain." In the third line the "pity" has got misplaced, and "sad complain" has been turned into "mournful tale," to the loss of the rhyme. Verse 4 has fared even worse. It runs-- "My hardened parents Gave special order That I should be Close confined be (_sic._) Within my chamber Far from all danger, Or lest that I Should my darling see." A parody on the song was written by Ashley, of Bath, and sung in "Bombastes Furioso," Rhodes' burlesque, in 1810, to the Irish tune of "Paddy O'Carrol." This appears also in "The London Warbler," 3 vols., N.D., but about 1826, vol. i. p. 80-- "My love is so pretty, so gay, and so witty, All in town, court, and city, to her must give place. My Lord on the woolsack, his coachman did pull back, To have a look, full smack, at her pretty face," etc. A Catnach Broadside, "The Cruel Father and the Affectionate Lovers," is a new version of the original ballad. Words and melody are probably of the Elizabethan age; an air to which this ballad has been recovered from tradition in Surrey resembles ours, and is a corruption of the earlier melody. The ballad goes back to a remote antiquity. The French have it, a "complainte romanesque," of which Tiersot says: "It was known in past ages, as is shown by a semi-literary imitation, published in a song-book of the beginning of the 17th century. And in our own day, poets and literary men, such as Gerard de Nerval, Prosper Mérimée, M. Auguste Vitu, have given their names to it, having picked it up as a precious thing from oral recitations by the peasants of our provinces." It is the ballad of a princess loving a knight, "qu' n'a pas vaillant six deniers." The King Loys, her father, has imprisoned her in the highest of his towers-- "Elle y fut bien sept ans passés Sans qu' son pèr' vint la visiter; Et quand l'y eut sept ans passés, Son père la fut visiter."--TIERSOT, _op. cit._ p. 20. There can, I think, be no doubt that it is an old troubadour lay which has been re-composed in Elizabethan times, and has since been somewhat degraded. 18. THE SILLY OLD MAN. A ballad that was sung by the late Rev. G. Luscombe something over half a century ago. He was curate of Bickleigh, and by ancestry belonged to a good old Devonshire family, and he was particularly fond of ancient West of England songs. Another version, from old Suey Stephens, a charwoman at Stowford; another, as sung in 1848, received from Dr. Reed in Tiverton. Miss Mason, in her "Nursery Rhymes and Country Songs," 1877, gives a slight variant, also from Devonshire.