Popular Music Of The Olden Time Vol 1

Share page


	348	ENGLISH SONG AND BALLAD MUSIC
	interlude, The longer thou livest the more fool thou qrt, 1568. It is not in the precise measure—there should be two long syllables, instead of " out of Kent," in the second bar, &c.—but I cannot find any old ballad, -with similar burdens, that corresponds exactly.



	DEERY DOWN. This tune is referred to as The Abbot of Canterbury; as Berry doivn; as A Cobbler there was; and as Death and the Cobbler. Henry Carey, in his Musical Century, 1740, i. 53, gives a song commencing— "King George he was born in the month of October— 'Tis a sin for a subject that month to be sober;" which is to this tune; and he says, " The melody stolen from an old ballad, called Death and the Cobbler." In Watts' Musical Miscellany, 1729, i. 94, is " A ballad to the old tune, The Abbot of Canterbury;" and, in the second volume of the same collection, "A Cobbler there was, set by Mr. Leveridge," who was then living. The tunes are essentially the same, but Leveridge altered a few notes in the second part. Dr. Percy remarks that " the common popular ballad of King John and the