The English and Scottish popular ballads, volume 5 (of 5)
General
The English and Scottish popular ballads, volume 5 (of 5)
Ballads, English -- England -- Texts; Ballads, Scots -- Scotland -- Texts
‘The King and the Cobbler’ (a prose history).[82] King Henry Eighth,
visiting the watches in the city, makes acquaintance with a cobbler,
and is entertained in the cobbler’s cellar; invites the cobbler to
court, directing him to inquire for Harry Tudor, etc.; settles upon him
land in the Strand worth fifty pound a year, which land is to be called
Cobler’s Acre.
* * * * *
Campbell, West Highland Tales, IV, 142, says that he has a Gaelic tale
like ‘The Miller of Mansfield.’
A Belgian story of the Emperor Charles Fifth and a broom-maker has all
the typical points of the older cycle, and, curiously enough, Charles
Fifth instructs the broom-maker to bring a load of his ware to the
palace to sell, as Charles the Great does in the case of Rauf Coilyear:
Maria von Ploennies, Die Sagen Belgiens, p. 251.
The same collection, p. 246 f., has the story of the man who wished to
see the king (an anecdote of Charles Fifth and a peasant). This story
turns up again in Thiele’s ‘Kongen og Bonden,’ Danmarks Folkesager, I,
62 (1843). Christian the Fourth, after a long walk, takes a seat in the
cart of a countryman who is on his way to the castle. The countryman
wishes that he might see the king; the king will be the only man to
keep his hat on; the countryman says, It must be you or I.
After the older pattern is this Russian story, Afanasief, VII, 233, No
32 (given me by Professor Wollner). A tsar who has lost himself while
hunting passes the night with a deserter in a robbers-hut in a wood.
They draw lots who shall stand guard, and the lot falls to the tsar,
to whom the soldier gives his side-arms. Notwithstanding many warnings,
the tsar dozes on his post, and at last the soldier, first punishing
him a little, packs him off to sleep. The robbers come, one by one, and
are shot by the soldier. The next day the deserter shows the tsar his
road, and afterwards pays the tsar a visit at court, discovers who his
comrade was, and is made general.
The Emperor Maximilian Second, while walking in a wood, comes upon a
charcoal-burner; they have a talk, and the emperor is invited to share
the man’s dumplings. Maximilian asks the charcoal-burner to pay him
a visit when he comes to the city, lets him see the princes and the
empress, and gives him a luncheon. There is no _éclaircissement_ at the
time. In the end the charcoal-burner and his family are employed in the
imperial garden.[83]
Robert Dodsley made a very pleasing little sentimental drama out of
‘The King and the Miller of Mansfield’ (1737), and from this play
(perhaps through a translation, ‘Le Roi et le Meunier,’ made before
1756), Sédaine took the substance of ‘Le Roi et le Fermier,’ 1762, and
Collé the idea of ‘La Partie de Chasse de Henri IV, 1774.’ Goldoni’s
musical drama, ‘Il re alla caccia’ (King Henry IV of England), produced
a year after Sédaine’s play, seems to have been suggested by it: vol.
37 of the edition of Venice, 1794.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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