FOLLY IN PRINT, REFERRED TO, BUT (N.B.) NOT EXEMPLIFIED. THE FAIR MAID OF DONCASTER. DOUBTS CONCERNING THE AUTHENTICITY OF HER STORY. THEVENARD AND LOVE ON A NEW FOOTING. STARS AND GARTERS, A MONITORY ANECDOTE FOR OUR SEX, AND A WHOLESOME NOVELTY IN DRESS RECOMMENDED TO BOTH. They be at hand, Sir, with stick and fiddle, They can play a new dance, Sir, called hey, diddle, diddle. KING CAMBYSES. You have in the earlier chapters of this Opus, gentle Reader, heard much of the musical history of Doncaster; not indeed as it would have been related by that thoroughly good, fine-ear'd, kind-hearted, open-handed, happiest of musicians and men, Dr. Burney the first; and yet I hope thou mayest have found something in this relation which has been to thy pleasure in reading, and which, if it should be little to thy profit in remembrance, will be nothing to thy hurt. From music to dancing is an easy transition, but do not be afraid that I shall take thee to a Ball,—for I would rather go to the Treading Mill myself. What I have to say of Doncaster dancing relates to times long before those to which my reminiscences belong. In a collection of Poems entitled “Folly in Print”—(which title might be sufficiently appropriate for many such collections)—or a Book of Rhymes, printed in 1667, there is a Ballad called the Northern Lass, or the Fair Maid of Doncaster. Neither book or ballad has ever fallen in my way, nor has that comedy of Richard Broome's, which from its name Oldys supposed to have been founded upon the same story. I learn however in a recent and voluminous account of the English Stage from the Revolution (by a gentleman profoundly learned in the most worthless of all literature, and for whom that literature seems to have been quite good enough,) that Broome's play has no connection with the ballad, or with Doncaster. But the note in which Oldys mentions it has made me acquainted with this Fair Maid's propensity for dancing, and with the consequences that it brought upon her. Her name was Betty Maddox; a modern ballad writer would call her Elizabeth, if he adopted the style of the Elizabethan age; or Eliza if his taste inclined to the refinements of modern euphony. When an hundred horsemen wooed her, says Oldys, she conditioned that she would marry the one of them who could dance her down; You shall decide your quarrel by a dance,[1] but she wearied them all; and they left her a maid for her pains. _Legiadria suos fervabat tanta per artus, Ut quæcunque potest fieri saltatio per nos Humanos, agili motu fiebat ab illâ._[2] [Footnote 1: DRYDEN.] [Footnote 2: MACARONICA.] At that dancing match they must have footed it till, as is said in an old Comedy, a good country lass's capermonger might have been able to copy the figure of the dance from the impressions on the pavement.