Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 10.djvu/178

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NOTES AND QUERIES.

[9 th S. X. AUG. 30, 1902.

that it dates from the eighteenth century. Does any one now know what class of writers evolved and set to music verses of this calibre ? So many of the old-fashioned songs, which seem to have been composed when George III. was king, or earlier, are descrip- tive of country life, that they can scarcely have been made for what would now be called a music-hall audience, familiar only with the customs of a large town. Were they intended to be sung at fairs and markets by strolling musicians, and sold as broad- sides ?

Mr. Howlett, of Kirton-in-Lindsey, who used to hear ' The Vicar and Moses ' sung in his youth, also remembers an old man singing a song which began :

Come, Davy, I '11 tell you a secret, If you '11 keep it snug in your breast :

I would not for old Eldon city It came to the ears of the rest

and concluded with :

I went to Tom in the Long Ings, For to hear his cracks and his jokes,

And there stood an old woman telling fortunes, So I must be like other folks.

With some chalk and a pair of old bellows, Two letters she wrote in my way :

S stands for Sally all the world over, And nothing but G stands for Gray. The metre of this love-ditty seems to have suffered change, and " old Eldon city " appears to be a corruption, but the descrip- tion of fortune-telling with " chalk and a pair of old bellows " makes it of value to the folk- lore collector. M. P.

(.The missing stanzas are too numerous for quota- ti9n in our pages. You will find the entire song, with some not very significant alterations, in ' The Universal Songster,' vol. i. p. 353 (G. Routledge & bons, n.d.), with Cruikshank's illustrations. The book can doubtless be seen at the British Museum. Such songs were, as a rule, sung by comedians in the plays of the late eighteenth century.]

NANA SAHIB AND THE INDIAN MUTINY. Is anything authentic known of the ultimate fate of Nana Sahib after his flight, with his brother Bala Rao, into Nepaul in the early months of 1859 1 I have seen it stated that he became a wanderer on the face of the earth, and is known to have so died. A few years ago I remember to have seen in one of the illustrated monthly magazines what pur- ported to be a narrative of his being seen an old and worn-out man and, I fancy, of his dying in the presence of the writer ; but my impression is that this was merely a fictitious sketch, and that the recognized writers on the Indian Mutiny state that he entirely disappeared after being hunted across the frontier, W B H

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SIR WALTER SCOTT'S 'WOODSTOCK.' (9 th S. x. 65.)

THE difficulties which perplex DEVON IKNSIS, and which lead him to attribute to the author of ' Woodstock ' " an extraordinary mistake " in reference to the age of Sir Henry Lee, and forgetfulness in reference to Roger Wild- rake's communication to Markham Everard of Cromwell's verbal conditions, will, I think, disappear on a careful study of the novel.

It is not accurate to say that Sir Henry "is represented throughout the novel as an old man," for Scott's initial description of him (Edin. ed., vol. xxxix. p. 2) is: "The man was elderly, yet seemed bent more by sorrow and infirmity than by the weight of years." It is true he had a long white beard (ibid., p. 27), and is in many places referred to as " the old man," and once at least as " old Henry Lee " ; but the earlier description must, in fairness to the author, be taken as qualifying all such phrases.

Sir Henry's own account of himself as one that was " a mere child " at the time of Shakspeare's death (1616) would not in the circumstances be an inapt description of a boy of ten, or even twelve. This would, in the year 1652, when the novel commences, make him forty-six or forty-eight, an age at which he might well have had a long white beard. Being, in addition, "bent by sorrow and infirmity," the general description of "old" can hardly be said to suggest any violent inconsistency, and is certainly no "extraordinary mistake." The "withered hand and shrivelled cheek " which Bevis used to lick, " the long beard bleached like the thistle down," and the general infirmity which had come upon the knight at the time of the king's progress to London, as men- tioned in the concluding chapter, are all of a later date, a time when Sir Henry might have been fifty-two or fifty-four ; and these apparent indications of age may, one and all, be attributed to the intense and wearing anxiety to which he had in the interval been exposed.

The second difficulty that connected with Roger Wild rake's suppression from Everard of Cromwell's verbal conditions is altogether imaginary. Wild rake's statement in the scene where he attempts the assassination of the general, that " Everard knew not a word of the rascally conditions," is no untruth, for when Everard endeavoured to take the packet from his hands on his return from the inter- view with Cromwell at Windsor, Wildrake's