EDITORIAL POSTSCRIPT:
1.—ON THE “AUTHOR” OF AN ANTIDOTE AGAINST MELANCHOLY, 1661.
Thanks be to the worthy bookseller, George Thomason,[8] for prudence in laying aside the “tall copy” of this amusing book, from which we make our transcript of text and engraving. Probably it did not exceed two shillings, in price; (at least, we have seen that Anthony à Wood’s uncropt copy of “Merry Drollery,” 1661, is marked in contemporary manuscript at “1s. 3d.,” each part). The title says:—
These witty Poems, though sometime [they]
may seem to halt on crutches,
Yet they’l all merrily please you
for your charge, which not much is.
Who was the “N. D.” to whose light labours we are indebted for the compounding of these “Witty Ballads, jovial Songs, and merry Catches” in Pills warranted to cure the ills of Melancholy, had not hitherto been ascertained[9]; or whether he wrote anything beside the above couplet, and the humorous address To the Reader, beginning,
There’s no Purge ’gainst Melancholy,
But with Bacchus to be jolly:
All else are but dreggs of Folly, &c. ([p. 111.])
As we suspected (flowing though his verse might be), he was more of bookseller than ballad-maker. His injunctions for us to “be wise and buy, not borrow,” had a terribly tradesman-like sound. Yet he was right. Book-borrowing is an evil practice; and book-lending is not much better. Woeful chasms, in what should be the serried ranks of our Library companions, remind us pathetically, in too many cases (book-cases, especially,) of some Coleridge-like “lifter” of Lambs, who made a raid upon our borders, and carried off plunder, sometimes an unique quarto, on other days an irrecoverable duodecimo: With Schiller, we bewail the departed,—
“The beautiful is vanished, and returns not.”
The title of “Pills to Purge Melancholy” was by Playford and Tom D’Urfey afterwards employed, and kept alive before the public, in many a volume from before 1684 until 1720, if not later. Whether “N. D.” himself were the “Mer[cury] Melancholicus” whose name appears as printer, for the book to be “sold in London and Westminster,” is to us not doubtful. By April 18, 1661,[10] Thomason had secured his copy, and there need be no question that it was for sport, and not through any fear of rigid censorship or malicious pettifogging interference by the law, that, instead of printer’s name, this pseudonym or nickname was adopted.
We believe that the mystery shrouding the personality of “N. D.” can be dispelled. The discovery helps us in more ways than one, and connects the Antidote against Melancholy, of 1661, in an intelligible and legitimate manner, with much jocular literature of later date. To us it seems clear that N. D. was no other than [He]n[ry] [Playfor]d. The triplets addressed in 1661 To the Reader, beginning “There’s no purge ’gainst Melancholy,” are repeated at commencement of the 1684 edition of “Wit and Mirth; or, an Antidote to Melancholy” (the third edition of “Pills to Purge Melancholy”) where they are entitled “The Stationer to the Reader,” and signed, not “N. D.,” but “H. P.;” for Henry Playford, whose name appears in full as publisher “near the Temple Church.” Thus, the repetition or alteration of the original title, “An Antidote against Melancholy, made up in Pills,” or, as the head-line puts it, “Pills to Purge Melancholy,” was, in all probability, a perfectly business-like reproduction of what Playford had himself originated. What relation Henry Playford was to John Playford, the publisher of “Select Ayres,” “Choice Ayres,” 1652, &c., we are not yet certain. Thirteen of the longest and most important poems from the 1661 Antidote[11] re-appear in that of 1684, beside four of the Catches. Indeed, the transmission of many of these Lyrics (by the editions of 1699, 1700, 1706, 1707) to the six volume edition, superintended by Tom D’Urfey in 1719-20, is unbroken; though we have still to find the edition published between 1661 and 1684.
But even the 1661 Antidote is not entitled to bear the credit of originating the phrase: Pills to purge Melancholy. So far as we know, by personal search, this belongs to Robert Hayman, thirty years earlier. Among his Quodlibets, 1628, on p. 74, we find the following epigram:—
“To one of the elders of the Sanctified Parlour of Amsterdam.
Though thou maist call my merriments, my folly,
They are my Pills to purge my melancholy;
They would purge thine too, wert thou not foole-holy.”
