Then, how his illustrations to his own poems—such as the pair of spectacles lying right across the landscape, following “In a Eweleaze near Weatherbury”—remind us of a seventeenth-century book of emblems!
Sometimes his excuse is that he is impersonating a man of an earlier age, as in the Sergeant’s song,—
“When Husbands with their Wives agree,
And Maids won’t wed from modesty,
Then little Boney he’ll pounce down,
And march his men on London town.
Rollicum-rorum, tol-lol-lorum,
Rollicum-rorum, tol-lol-lay.”
He has written songs and narratives which prove his descent from some ancient ballad-maker, perhaps the one who wrote “A pleasant ballad of the merry miller’s wooing of the baker’s daughter of Manchester,” or “A new ballade, showing the cruel robberies and lewd life of Philip Collins, alias Osburne, commonly called Philip of the West, who was pressed to death at Newgate in London the third of December last past, 1597,” to be sung to the tune of “Pagginton’s round.” Some of the lyric stanzas to which he fits a narrative originated probably in some such tune.
And how often is he delighted to represent a peasant’s view, a peasant’s contribution to the irony of things, a capital instance being the Belgian who killed Grouchy to save his farm, and so lost Napoleon the battle of Waterloo.