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ILLUSTRATING SHAKESPEAKE. 211 |
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" What doth't avail far hence to sail, "Tis a beastly thing to lie musing
And lead our life in toiling? With pensiveness and sorrow;
Or to what end should we here spend For who can tell that he shall well
Our days in irksome moiling ? [labour] . -Live here until the morrow ?
It is the best to live at rest, We will, therefore, for evermore,
And take't as God doth send it; While this our life is lasting,
To haunt each wake, and mirth to make, Eat, drink, and sleep, and ' merry ' keep,
And with good fellows spend it. 'Tis Popery to use fasting.
Nothing is worse than a full purse In cards and dice our comfort lies,
To niggards and to pinchers; In sporting and in dancing,
They always spare, and live in care, Our minds to please and live at ease,
There's no man loves such flinchers. And sometimes to use prancing.
The merry man, with cup and can, With Bess and Nell we love to dwell
Lives longer than do twenty; In kissing and in ' talking; '
The miser's wealth doth hurt his health;— But whoop! ho holly, with trolly lolly,
Examples we have plenty. To them we'll now be walking."
Collier's History of Early Dramatic Poetry, ii. 470. '
Jog on, jog on.
This tune is in The Dancing Master, from 1650 to 1698, called Jog on; also in Queen Elizabeth's Virginal Book, under the name of Hanskin. The words of Jog on, of which the first verse is sung by Autolycus, in act iv., sc. 2, of Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale, are in The Antidote against Melancholy, 1661. Another name for the tune is Sir Francis Drake, or Eighty-eight.
The following is the song from The Antidote against Melancholy:— " Jog on, jog on the footpath way, . Your paltry money-bags of gold,
And merrily hent" the stile-a; What need have we to stare for,
Your merry heart goes all the day ; When little or nothing soon is told,
Your sad tires in a mile-a. And we have the less to care for.
Cast care away, let sorrow cease,
A fig for melancholy; Let's laugh and sing, or, if you please,
We'll frolic with sweet Dolly."
In the Westminster Drollery, 3rd edit., 1672, is " An old song on the Spanish Armado," beginning, " Some years of late, in eighty-eight;" and in MSS. Harl., 791, fol. 59, and in Merry Drollery complete, 1661, a different version of the same, commencing, " In eighty-eight, ere I was born." Both have been reprinted for the Percy Society in Halliwell's Naval Ballads of Ikgland. The former is also in Pills to purge Melancholy, 1707, ii. 37, and 1719, iv. 37, or Ritson's Ancient Songs, 1790, p. 271.
In the Collection of Ballads in the Chcetham Library, Manchester, fol. 30, is
» To hent or hend is to hold or seize. At the head of "Upon the sea, tillJhesu Crist him hente. "—Chaucer, one of the chapters of Sir Walter Scott's novels, this is line 700.
misquoted "bend." " Till they the reynes of his bridel henlen."— Chaucer,
"And in his hand a battle-axe he hent"—Honor of the line 900.
Garter, by George Peele. " Or reave it out of the hand that did it hend."—Spenser's
Faery Queen. |
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