Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/53

Rh for the entry need not refer to No. 13 ("Pyramus and Thisbie"), and cannot refer to No. 21, which tells no story at all.

4. No. 29, because it was licensed in 1576. This is correct.

5. No. 7, because the tune comes from ballads licensed in 1580. This is correct.

6. No. 14, because its tune was taken from a ballad registered in 1582. This is correct.

7. No. 16, because the tune was derived from a ballad not registered until 1567-68. This is wrong.

From the following notes it will be seen that only three of the nine ballads listed by Arber appeared after 1566, while others which he failed to name are here pointed out. The notes may help to give a clearer idea of what the first edition could have contained, and some of them (as Nos. 2, 3, and 29, which produce new facts about Leonard Gibson and Thomas Richardson and help to establish the date of Misogonus) may perhaps be found of independent value. Points previously made by other investigators are fully acknowledged below.

A book called "a nose gaye" was licensed by John King in 1557 (Trans., I, 75), and Collier (Extracts, I, 3) thought that this might be our ballad. The identification is very doubtful. Arber's reference (p. vi) to "a newe yeres gefte," 1567 (Trans., I, 336), is not apropos; but the ballad of "A Smellinge Nosegaye," which had been owned by Williamson and which was registered by Charlewood on January 15, 1581–2 (Trans. II, 406), is undoubtedly our ballad. No. 1, then, was very probably added to the 1584 edition. Thomas Evans, who reprints the "Nosegaie" and several other of the "Delights" in his Old Ballads (1810), thinks that Ophelia alludes to this ballad in her ramblings about rosemary, fennel, etc. (Hamlet, IV, v).

This ballad was not registered. The tune (cf. No. 13, below), however, is old: a ballad "To the tune of The downeryght squyre" is preserved in Bodleian MS. Ashmole 48 (Songs and Ballads, ed. Thomas Wright, 1860, p. 191), which Wright