whence we are to infer that his music was not usually of the very best kind. The resemblance, as to attitude and dress, between the figures of this character in Mr. Tollett's painting and the Flemish print, is remarkable. In both we have the sword and feather. What Mr. Tollett has termed his silver shield seems a mistake for the lower part or flap of his stomacher.
VII. The Hobby-Horse; of which the earliest vestige now remaining is in the painted window at Betley. It has been already observed that he was often omitted in the morris. During the reign of Elizabeth the Puritans made considerable havoc among the May-games, by their preachings and invectives. Poor Maid Marian was assimilated to the whore of Babylon; friar Tuck was deemed a remnant of Popery, and the Hobby-horse an impious and Pagan superstition; and they were at length most completely put to the rout as the bitterest enemies of religion. King James's book of sports restored the lady and the hobby-horse: but during the commonwealth they were again attacked by a new set of fanatics; and, together with the whole of the May festivities, the Whitsun-ales, &c., in many parts of England degraded. At the restoration they were once more revived.[191] The allusions to the omission of the Hobby-horse are frequent in the old plays, and the line
"For O, for O, the hobby-horse is forgot,"
is termed by Hamlet an epitaph, which Mr. Theobald supposed, with great probability, to have been satirical. The following extract from a scene in Beaumont and Fletcher's Women pleased, Act IV., will best show the sentiments of the puritans on this occasion, and which the author has deservedly ridiculed:
Hob.
Surely I will dance no more, 'tis most ridiculous,
I find my wife's instructions now mere verities,
My learned wife's, she often hath pronounc'd to me
My safety; Bomby, defie these sports, thou art damn'd else.
This beast of Babylon I will never back again,
His pace is sure prophane, and his lewd wi-hees,
The sons of Hymyn and Gymyn, in the wilderness.
Far.
Fie neighbour Bomby, in your fits again?
Your zeal sweats, this is not careful, neighbour,
The Hobby-horse is a seemly Hobby-horse.
Hob.
The beast is an unseemly, and a lewd beast,
And got at Rome by the Pope's coach-horses,
His mother was the mare of ignorance.