Pope wrote an epigram which he had engraved on the collar of a dog, and gave it to H.R.H.:—
The jingle of the bells in nursery poetry is certainly the prettiest of all the features in the poetical fictions of Baby-land.
The oft-repeated rhyme of—
has a charm with every child.
The ride of my Lady of Godiva is fancifully suggested by the Coventry version.
This almost forgotten nursery song and game of "The Bells of London Town" has a descriptive burden or ending to each line, giving an imitation of the sounds of the bell-peals of the principal churches in each locality of the City and the old London suburbs. The game is played by girls and boys holding hands and racing round sideways, as they do in "Ring a Ring a Rosies," after each line has been sung as a solo by the children in turns. The
is chorussed by all the company, and then the rollicking dance begins; the feet stamping out a noisy but enjoyable accompaniment to the words, "Gay go up, gay go down."
The intonation of the little vocal bell-ringers alters with each line,
being sung to a quick tune and in a high key;
suggesting a very slow movement and a deep, low tone.
The round singing of the ancients, of which this game is a fitting illustration, is probably a relic of Celtic festivity. The burden of a song, chorussed by the entire company, followed the stanza sung by the vocalist, and this soloist, having finished, had licence to appoint the next singer, "canere ad myrtum," by handing him the myrtle branch. At all events round singing was anciently so performed by the Druids, the Bardic custom of the men of the wand.
In Lancashire—
is one of the songs the cottage mother sings to her child.
The Provençal—
Every locality furnishes examples of bell rhymes. Selling the church bells of Hutton, in Lincolnshire, gave rise to this satire of the children—
In 1793 Newington Church, London, was pulled down, the bells sold, and the sacred edifice rebuilt without a belfry. The children of the neighbouring parishes soon afterwards jeered at the Newingtonians.
In Derbyshire a large number of the churches have bells with peculiar peals—
The bells of Bow Church ringing out the invitation to Dick Whittington to return to his master's house should not be forgotten—
In New York, U.S.A., the little school urchins sing a bell rhyme of—
In 1660, when the Restoration of Charles II. took place, the great procession of State to St. Paul's Cathedral called forth this rhyme:—
A Roundhead sneer at the man in the street, after the Royalist rejoicings were over.
In a copy of rhyming proverbs in the British Museum, written about the year 1680, occurs the following Puritan satire on Charles II.'s changeability:—
Among Marvel's works (vol. i. pp. 434-5) a witty representation of the king's style of speech is given with the jeu d'esprit so distinctively peculiar to Marvel:—
"My proclamation is the true picture of my mind. Some may perhaps be startled and cry, 'How comes this sudden change?' To which I answer, 'I am a changeling, and that's sufficient, I think. But, to convince men further that I mean what I say, these are the arguments. First, I tell you so, and you know I never break my word; secondly, my Lord Treasurer says so, and he never told a lie in his life; thirdly, my Lord Lauderdale will undertake it for me. I should be loath by any act of mine he should forfeit the credit he has with you.'"
In England Charles gave his Royal Indulgence to Dissenters, and granted them full liberty of conscience. They who had been horribly plundered and ill-treated now built meeting-houses, and thronged to them in public. Shaftesbury, who afterwards became a Papist, exclaimed, "Let us bless God and the king that our religion is safe, that parliaments are safe, that our properties and liberties are safe. What more hath a good Englishman to ask, but that the king may long reign, and that this triple alliance of king, parliament, and the people may never be dissolved?" But Charles had a standing army in Scotland, with the Duke of Lauderdale as Lord High Commissioner, and all classes of people in that country were obliged to depose on oath their knowledge of persons worshipping as Dissenters, on penalty of fine, imprisonment, banishment, transportation, and of being sold as slaves. Persecutions of former times were surpassed, the thumbscrew and the boot were used as mild punishments, the rack dislocated the limbs of those who respected conscience, and the stake consumed their bodies to ashes. Villagers were driven to the mountains, and eighteen thousand Dissenters perished, not counting those who were accused of rebellion. He was "a man of words," and the rhyme of this period depicts his whole character.
Two of the courtezans of Charles II.'s time were Lucy Locket and Kitty Fisher. The following rhyme suggests that Kitty Fisher supplanted Lucy Locket in Charles' fickle esteem—
On his death-bed the monarch commended the Duchesses of Cleveland and Portsmouth to his successor, and said to James, "Do not let poor Nelly (Nell Gwynne) starve!" Even their pockets were as badly lined as Lucy Locket's.
The hatred of the Roman Catholic religion "had become," said Macaulay, "one of the ruling passions of the community, and was as strong in the ignorant and profane as in those who were Protestants from conviction." Charles II. was suspected by many of leaning towards the Roman Catholic religion. His brother, and heir presumptive, was discovered to be a bigoted Catholic, and in defiance to the remonstrances of the House of Commons had married another papist—Mary of Modena.
The common people apprehended a return of the times of her whom they unreasonably called Bloody Mary. Sons of this marriage, they feared, meant a long succession of princes and kings hostile to the Protestant faith and government by the people. In 1689, when William of Orange became king in James II.'s place, a political squib went off in the style of a nursery lullaby, entitled "Father Peter's policy discovered; or, the Prince of Wales proved a Popish Perkin"—
The Douce MS. contains—
At the beginning of this present century the renowned Pastorini contributed his share to simple rhyming. A writer in the Morning Chronicle of that period points out Pastorini as being no less a personage than the Right Rev. Charles Walmesley, D.D., a Roman Catholic prelate, whose false prophecies under the name of Pastorini were intended to bring about the events they pretended to foretell—the destruction of the Irish Protestants in 1825. Just previous to this year every bush and bramble in Ireland had this remarkable couplet affixed to it—
In 1835, when the efforts of the Whig Ministry to despoil the Irish Church proved so strong, a writer in the Press caricatured Lord Grey, Lyttleton, Dan O'Connell, and Lord Brougham in the following nursery rhymes. The attempt was ingenious, but only of small value as showing the rhymes to be the popular ones of that day.
The other rhymes were—
This rhyme was sung at the time in derision to Earl Grey's and Lord Brougham's aerial, vapoury projects of setting the Church's house in order.
"Lord Grey," said the satire-monger, "provided the cupboards and larders for himself and relatives. He was a paradoxical 'old woman' who could never keep quiet."
As a prototype of reform this old woman was further caricatured as Madame Reform.
The going "up in a basket ninety-nine times as high as the moon" referred to Lord Grey's command to the English bishops to speedily set their house in order. The ascent was flighty enough, "ninety-nine times as high as the moon, to sweep the cobwebs off the sky"—in other words, to set the Church, our cathedrals and bishops' palaces in order—and augured well; but this old woman journeyed not alone, in her hand she carried a broom (Brougham). It may have been a case of ultra-lunacy this journey of ninety-nine times as high as the moon, and "one cannot help thinking," said a writer of that period, "of the song, 'Long life to the Moon'; but this saying became common, 'If that time goes the coach, pray what time goes the basket?'"
The "Robbin, a bobbin, the big-bellied Ben" parody alluded to Dan O'Connell; the butcher and a half to the Northamptonshire man and his driver; eating "church" and "steeple" meant Church cess.
O'Connell certainly did cut the Church measure about. In his curtailment he would not leave a room or a church for Irish Protestants to pray in.
"Little dog" refers to Lyttleton in the nursery rhyme, for when the under-trafficing came to light, Lord Grey, it is said, was so bewildered at his position that he doubted his own identity, and exclaimed—
FINIS
Transcriber's Endnote:
On p. 96. But the stick would not. has been added as line 6 of the poem beginning "There was an old woman swept her house ..."