Even the Blessed Virgin
She’s now brought forth a son.
DIVES AND LAZARUS
The Text is given from Joshua Sylvester’s A Garland of Christmas Carols, where it is printed from an old Birmingham broadside.
The Story is one which naturally attracted the attention of the popular ballad-maker, and parallel ballads exist in fairly wide European distribution.
Like the Carnal and the Crane, the form in which this ballad is now known is no witness of its antiquity. A ‘ballet of the Ryche man and poor Lazarus’ was licensed to be printed in 1558; ‘a ballett, Dyves and Lazarus,’ in 1570-1.
In Fletcher’s Monsieur Thomas (1639), a fiddler says he can sing the merry ballad of Diverus and Lazarus. A correspondent in Notes and Queries (ser. IV. iii. 76) says he had heard only Diverus, never Dives, and contributes from memory a version as sung by carol-singers at Christmas in Worcestershire, in which the parallelism of the stanzas is pushed so far that, in the lines corresponding to 13.3 and 13.4 in the present version, we have the delightfully popular idea—
‘There is a place prepared in hell,
For to sit upon a serpent’s knee.’