From a Cornish Window / A New Edition - Arthur Quiller-Couch

On this exquisite close the carol might well end, as Mr. Bullen with his usual fine judgment makes it end. But the old copies give an additional stanza, and a very silly one:—

"O then spoke the angel Gabriel,
Upon one good St. Stephen,
Although you're but a maiden's child,
You are the King of Heaven."

'One good St. Stephen' is obviously an ignorant misprint for 'one good set steven,' i.e. 'appointed time,' and so it appears in Mr. Bramley's book, and in Mr. W. H. Husk's Songs of the Nativity. But the stanza is foolish, and may be dismissed. To amend the text of the children's answer is less legitimate. Yet one feels sorely tempted; and I cannot help suggesting that the original ran something like this:—

"But they made answer to Him, No:
They were lords and ladies all;
And He was but a maiden's child,
Born in an ox's stall.
"Sweet Jesus turned Him round about,
And He neither laughed nor smiled,
But the tears came trickling from His eyes
To be but a maiden's child.…"

I plead for this suggestion: (1) that it adds nothing to the text and changes but one word; (2) that it removes nothing but the weak and unrhyming 'Like water from the skies'; and (3) that it leads directly to Mary's answer:—

"Though you are but a maiden's child,
Born in an ox's stall," &c.

But it were better to hunt out the original than to accept any emendation; and I hope you will agree that the original of this little poem, so childlike and delicately true, is worth hunting for. "The carol," says Mr. Husk, "has a widely-spread popularity. On a broadside copy printed at Gravesend,"—presumably the one from which 'Joshua Sylvester' took his version—"there is placed immediately under the title a woodcut purporting to be a representation of the site of the Holy Well, Palestine; but the admiration excited thereby for the excellent good taste of the printer is too soon alas! dispelled, for between the second and third stanzas we see another woodcut representing a feather-clad-and-crowned negro seated on a barrel, smoking—a veritable ornament of a tobacconists' paper."