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REIGNS OF JAMES I. AND CHARLES I. 307 |
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Companion of Love, printed by John Carr in 1688;a and, as frequently the case, the air was a little altered for the words.
Of this song Sir John Hawkins relates the following anecdote in his History of Music (870., ii. 564) :—
" This tune was greatly admired by Queen Mary, the consort of King "William; and she once affronted Purcell by requesting to have it sung to her, he being present. ' The story is as follows: The Queen having a mind one afternoon to be entertained with music, sent to Mr. Gosling, then one of her Chapel, and afterwards Sub-Dean of St. Paul's, to Henry Purcell, and to Mrs. Arabella Hunt, who had a very fine voice, and an admirable hand on the lute, with a request to attend her; they obeyed her commands^ Mr. Gosling and Mrs. Hunt sung several compositions of Purcell, who accompanied them upon the harpsichord; at length, the Queen beginning to grow tired, asked Mrs. Hunt if she could not sing the ballad of'Cold and raw;'b Mrs. Hunt answered, Yes, and sung it to her lute. Purcell was all the while sitting at the harpsichord unemployed, and not a little nettled at the Queen's preference of a vulgar ballad to his music; but seeing Her Majesty delighted with this tune, he determined that she should hear it upon another occasion; and, accordingly, in the next birthday song, viz., that for the year 1G92, he composed an air to the words,' May her bright example chace vice in troops out of the land,' the bass whereof is the tune to ' Cold and raw.'"
In Anthony a Wood's collection of broadsides (Ashmolean Library, vol. 417) there are two ballads with music, bearing the date of December, 1688, and printed to this tune. The first is " The Irish Lassos Letter; or her earnest request to Teague, her dear joy: to an excellent new tune" The second is the famous song of IAlliburlero.
In the Douce Collection is a ballad called " The lusty Friar of Flanders: to the tune of Cold and raw."
Horace Walpole mentions it under the same name in a letter to Richard West, Esq., dated from Florence (Feb. 27,1740), where, in speaking of the Carnival, he says, " The Italians are fond to a degree of our Country Dances.0 Cold and raw they only know by the tune; Blowzybella is almost Italian, and Btdter'd Peas is Pizelli al buro." (Letters of Walpole, in vi. vols, 1840; vol. i. p. 32.)
The following is the song of "A cup of old stingo," from'Merry Drollery Complete, with the tune from The Dancing Master of 1650. |
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* A few pages further In the same book there is another "new Scotch song," set by Mr. Akeroyd.
Ritson, in his Historical Essay on Scotuh Song, 1794, says, "An inundation of Scotch songs, so called, appears to have been poured upon the town by Tom D'Urfey and his Grub-street.brethren, toward the end of the seventeenth and in the beginning of the eighteenth century; of which it is hard to say whether wretchedness of poetry, ignorance of the Scotish dialect, or nastiness of ideas, Is most evident, or most despicable. In the number of these miserable caricatures, the reader may be a little surprised to find the favorite songs of De'Ul take the Wart thathurry'd Willy from me; 0 Jenny, Jenny, where hast thou been? Young Philander wooed me long; Farewell, my bonny, witty, pretty Moggy; In January last; She rose and let me in; Pretty Kale of Edinburgh ; As I sat at my spinning wheel; Fife, and a' the lands about it; Bonny lad, prithee lay thy pipe down; The bonnygrey-ey'd morn; 'Twos within a furlong of Edinburgh town ; Bonny Dundee; |
O'er the hills andfar. away; By moonlight on the green; IfTiat's that to you ? and several others, which he has been probably used to consider as genuine specimens of Scotish song; as, indeed, most of them are regarded even in Scotland." Eitson's list might be very greatly extended.
b Sir John Hawkins, who relates the anecdote traditionally, and who had evidently seen no older copy of the tune than that contained in the Catch (as he elsewhere mentions Hilton's Catches as Playford'syfrif publication) calls it " the old Scot's ballad," but from the allusion to " the next birth-day song," it must have happened within four years of the first publication. The term "old," could therefore only be applied, with propriety, to the music.
• This agrees with what I have been told about the book entitled The Dancing Master (the early editions of which are extremely scarce in England), viz., that it is very well known to the dealers in Italy, and that it may be procured there with comparatively little trouble. |
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