NEW ELEGY.
Plate XIV.
This figure was drawn and etched by the writer from an itinerant vendor of Elegies, Christmas Carols, and Love Songs. His father and grandfather had followed the same calling.
When this man was asked what particular event he recollected, his information was principally confined to the Elegies he had sold. He seemed anxious, however, to inform the public that in the year 1753 the quartern loaf was sold at fourpence halfpenny, mutton was two-pence halfpenny a pound, that porter was then three-pence a pot, and that the National Debt was twenty-four millions. Notwithstanding this man’s memory served him in the above particulars, which perhaps he had repeated so often that he could not forget them, yet he positively did not know his age; he said he never troubled his head with that, for that his father told him if he only mentioned the year of his birth any scholar could tell it. His father, he observed, cried the Elegy of that notorious magistrate Sir Thomas de Veil,[13] which went through nine editions, as there was hardly a thief or strumpet that did not purchase one.
Hogarth is supposed to have introduced this magistrate in his “Woman swearing a Child to a grave Citizen.” In his Plate of “Night,” the drunken Freemason has also been supposed to be Sir Thomas de Veil. This man had rendered himself so obnoxious by his intrigues with women, and his bare-faced partialities in screening the opulent, that the executors, who were afraid of the coffin being torn to pieces by the mob, privately conveyed it to a considerable distance from Bow Street by three o’clock in the morning.
It was formerly not only the custom to print Elegies on the great people, but on all those in the lowest class of life who had rendered themselves conspicuous as public characters. Indeed we may recollect the Elegies to the memory of Sam House, the political tool of Mr. Fox among the vulgar part of his voters, and also that to the memory of Henry Dimsdale, the muffin man, nicknamed Sir Harry Dimsdale, the Mayor of Garratt, who succeeded the renowned Sir Jeffrey Dunstan, commonly called Old Wigs, from his being a purchaser of those articles. The last Elegy was to the memory of the lamented Princess Charlotte, and it was then that the portrait of the above-mentioned Elegy-vender was taken.
With respect to his Christmas Carols, he said they had varied almost every year in their bordered ornaments; and the writer regrets the loss of a collection of Christmas Carols from the time of this man’s grandfather, which, had he been fortunate enough to have made his drawing of the above vendor only three days before, he could have purchased for five shillings. The collectors in general of early English woodcuts may not be aware that there were printed Christmas Carols so early as Queen Mary the First. The writer, when a boy, detected several patches of one that had been fastened against the wall of the Chapel of St. Edmond in Westminster Abbey. It had marginal woodcut illustrations, which reminded him of those very interesting blocks engraved for “Hollinshed’s Chronicle.” It appears that some part of this curious Carol was remaining when Mr. Malcolm wrote his description of the above Chapel for his Work on London. (Vol. I. p. 144.)
Love Songs, however old they might be, were pronounced by our Elegy-vender to be always saleable among the country people. Robert Burton, in his “Anatomy of Melancholy,” part 3, sect. 2, speaking of love songs, says, “As Carmen, Boyes, and Prentises, when a new song is published with us, go singing that new tune still in the streets, they continually acted that tragical part of Perseus, and in every man’s mouth was O, Cupid! Prince of Gods and Men! pronouncing still like stage-players, O, Cupid! they were so possessed all with that rapture, and thought of that pathetical love speech, they could not a long time after forget, or drive it out of their minds, but, O, Cupid! Prince of Gods and Men! was ever in their mouths.”
In the second volume, page 141, of Shenstone’s Works, the author says, “The ways of ballad singers, and the cries of halfpenny pamphlets, appeared so extremely humourous, from my lodgings in Fleet Street, that it gave me pain to observe them without a companion to partake. For, alas! laughter is by no means a solitary entertainment.”