Fresh from repose, toil’s kind reliever;
And furnish’d with his daily stock—
His dog, his staff, his keg, his beaver—
He travels till the village clock
Sounds sweet the lab’rer’s welcome home!
Here the pictures are perfect; each is in its way a little Bewick. If there is once or twice a slight roughness in the metre, it is such as may be met with in Cowley; and if the introduction of ‘lares’ at an English hearth startles us a little, it is just such surprises as come upon us in Cowley and the poets of his time. The charm of the above song is greatly enhanced by the music. We have no such songs nor any such music for English people generally in these days. Music-hall ruffianism woos the public ear with beastly innuendo, worse than downright speaking, and the Hurlingham husseydoms, after assisting at the butchery of doves, talk music-hall slang and play Champagne Charley quadrilles.
Let us now add a word respecting another child of song, born in Southampton, and still living when Charles Dibdin came there into the world—Isaac Watts. Isaac Watts and Charles Dibdin! Why not? They are not so far apart as you may think. Isaac, the Southampton Nonconformist schoolmaster’s son, lived from 1674, reign of Charles the Second, to 1748, reign of the second George. Charles Dibdin was, at the latter period, three years old. The piety of Watts is no more questionable than the loyalty of Dibdin. Watts upheld piety by simple means in an impious age. Dibdin sustained loyalty at a time when revolutionary ideas were struggling into activity at home, and when there were enemies abroad who found moral support in such a struggle. If Dibdin’s allegiance found occasionally exaggerated expression, so Watts’s piety sometimes found a rather arrogant utterance. Dibdin, however, was—strange as it may appear—more humble and contented than Watts. In a ballad in ‘The Old Woman of Eighty,’ Dibdin makes a crowd of poor unlearned country folk sing:—
Come here, ye rich; come here, ye great;
Come here, ye grave: come here, ye gay;
Behold our blest, though humble fate,