The model for An Elegy on Mrs. Mary Blaize is to be found in the old French popular song of Monsieur de la Palisse or Palice, about fifty verses of which are printed in Larousse’s Grand Dictionnaire Universel du XIX me Siècle, x. p. 179. It is there stated to have originated in some dozen stanzas suggested to la Monnoye (v. supra, p. 193) by the extreme artlessness of a military quatrain dating from the battle of Pavia, and the death upon that occasion of the famous French captain, Jacques de Chabannes, seigneur de la Palice:—
Monsieur d’La Palice est mort,
Mort devant Pavie;
Un quart d’heure avant sa mort,
Il était encore en vie.
The remaining verses, i.e. in addition to those of la Monnoye, are the contributions of successive generations. Goldsmith probably had in mind the version in Part iii of the Ménagiana, (ed. 1729, iii, 384–391) where apparently by a typographical error, the hero is called ‘le fameux la Galisse, homme imaginaire.’ The verses he imitated most closely are reproduced below. It may be added that this poem supplied one of its last inspirations to the pencil of Randolph Caldecott, who published it as a picture-book in October, 1885. (See also An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog, p. 212.)
[Who left a pledge behind.] Caldecott cleverly converted this line into the keynote of the poem, by making the heroine a pawnbroker.
[When she has walk’d before.] Cf. the French:—
On dit que dans ses amours
Il fut caresse des belles,
Qui le suivirent toujours,
Tant qu’il marcha devant elles.
[Her last disorder mortal.] Cf. the French:—
Il fut par un triste sort
Blesse d’une main cruelle.
On croit, puis qu’il en est mort,
Que la plaie étoit mortelle.
[Kent Street,] Southwark, ‘chiefly inhabited,’ said Strype, ‘by Broom Men and Mumpers’; and Evelyn tells us (Diary 5th December, 1683) that he assisted at the marriage, to her fifth husband, of a Mrs. Castle, who was ‘the daughter of one Burton, a broom-man . . . in Kent Street’ who had become not only rich, but Sheriff of Surrey. It was a poor neighbourhood corresponding to the present ‘old Kent-road, from Kent to Southwark and old London Bridge’ (Cunningham’s London).* Goldsmith himself refers to it in The Bee for October 20, 1759, being the number immediately preceding that in which Madam Blaize first appeared:—‘You then, O ye beggars of my acquaintance, whether in rags or lace; whether in Kent-street or the Mall; whether at the Smyrna or St. Giles’s, might I advise as a friend, never seem in want of the favour which you solicit’ (p. 72). Three years earlier he had practised as ‘a physician, in a humble way’ in Bankside, Southwark, and was probably well acquainted with the humours of Kent Street.
* In contemporary maps Kent (now Tabard) Street is shown extending between the present New Kent Road and Blackman Street.