Though wedlock's a bolus to physic and fright,
A black draught—a widow! would finish me quite.”
“A vile stave! Commend me to 'fonde Elderton,' * and the troop of 'metre ballad-mongers' that sleep among the dull of ancient days; but save me from that doleful doggrel of which, I shrewdly suspect, thou, Benjamin Bosky, art the perpetrator.
* The following is a description of Elderton by a
contemporary writer in 1582. See “Reporte of the Death and
Martyr-dome of M. Campion, Jesuit, &c.”
“Fonde Elderton, call in thy foolish rhime,
Thy scurill balates are to bad to sell;
Let good men rest, and mende thy self in time,
Confesse in prose thou hast not metred well;
Or if thy folly cannot chuse but fayne
Write alehotise toys, blaspheme not in thy vain.”
It smells woundily of thy peculiar locality, and might have befringed the walls of Bedlam and Soho. Henceforth be the Magnus Apollo of thy native Little Britain, and divide the crown with Thomas Delony, of huck-ster-fame! Jack of Newbery, the Gentle Craft, garlands, strange histories,
'And such small deer,
Had been Tom's food for many a year,'
and may serve for thine, Benjamin; for, in poetical matters, thou hast the maw of a kite and the digestion of an ostrich.”
“A sprat to catch a herring!”
“A tittlebat! thou triton of the minnows!”