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622 ENGLISH SONG AND BALLAD MUSIC. |
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D'Urfey printed five collections of his own songs, and many of the same were afterwards included in Pills to purge Melancholy. In the first two collections are various songs which were " sung to the King;" indeed, wherever Charles went, D'Urfey seems to have been engaged to entertain him. " Quoth John to Joan," or " I cannot come every day to woo;" " The Spinning Wheel," (" Upon a sunshine summer's day") ; " Pretty Kate of Edinburgh;" and " Advice to the City," are among those which were sung to the King at Windsor. The last commences— " Remember, ye Whigs, what was formerly done, Remember your mischiefs in Forty and One ; " and D'Urfey tells us, in the Pills, that the King held one part of the paper, and sang it with him. Others were heard at Newmarket, at Winchester, " at his entertainment at my Lord Conway's," and one " sung to the King and Queen, upon Sir John Moor's being chosen Lord Mayor."
D'Urfey was one of those who wrote panegyrics upon James, when Duke of York, and congratulatory verses upon his return from Scotland. In the preface to the Pills, he boasts of having " performed some of his own things before their Majesties, King Charles II., King James, King William, Queen Mary, Queen Anne, and Prince George of Denmark;" and that, on such occasions, he never quitted them " without happy and commendable approbation." He also wrote a " Vive le Roy" for George the First, and " A new song on his happy accession to the crown;" but Tom was then grown old, and we have no proof of his having been in favour with that Monarch. Moreover, the King could not have approved, if he knew, of a song which D'Urfey is said to have written upon his mother, the Princess Sophia, Electress and Duchess Dowager of Hanover. This was to please Queen Anne, by complimenting her upon her youth at the expense of the Princess, who was next heir to the crown, and no great favorite with Queen Anne, as excluding her brother from the succession. The Queen is said to have given D'Urfey fifty guineas for singing it.
" The crown's far too weighty Has grown so unsteady
For shoulders of eighty, She can't hold a sceptre;
She could not sustain such a trophy, So Providence kept her
Her hand, too, already Away,—poor old Dowager Sophy."
Hone's Table Book, p. 560.
A very amusing sketch of the life of D'Urfey will be found in Household Words, in which the writer quotes a note to The Dunciad, to prove that Tom was the last English poet who appeared in the streets attended by a page. The popularity of his songs in the country is alluded to by Pope, in a letter dated April 10,1710. He says:—
"I have not quoted one Latin author since I came down, but have learned without book a song of Mr. Thomas D'Urfey's, who is your only poet of tolerable reputation in this country. He makes all the merriment in our entertainments, and, but for him, there would be so miserable a dearth of catches, that I fear they would put either the parson or me upon making some for 'em. Any man, of any quality, is heartily welcome to the best topeing-table of our gentry, who can roar out some rhapsodies of his works. . . . Alas, sir, neither you with your Ovid, nor I with my |
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