“I have known a great man,” says Taylor the Water-Poet, “very expert on the Jews-harp; a rich heir excellent at Noddy; a Justice of the Peace skilful at Quoytes; a Merchant's Wife a quick gamester at Irish, especially when she came to bearing of men, that she would seldom miss entering.” Injurious John Taylor! thus to defraud thy friends of their fame, and leave in irremediable oblivion the proper name of that expert Jews-Harper, that person excellent at Noddy, that great Quoytes-man, and that Mistress who played so masterly a game at Irish!—But I thank thee for this, good John the Water-Poet; thou hast told us that Monsieur La Ferr, a Frenchman, was the first inventor of the admirable game of Double-hand, Hot Cockles, &c., and that Gregory Dawson, an Englishman, devised the unmatchable mystery of Blind-man's-buff. But who can tell me what the game of Carps was, the Ludus Carparum, which Hearne says was used in Oxford much, and being joined with cards, and reckoned as a kind of alea, is prohibited in some statutes. When Thomas Hearne, who learned whatever Time forgot, was uncertain what game or play it really was, and could only conjecture that perhaps it might be a sort of Back-gammon, what antiquary can hope to ascertain it?
“Elizabeth Canning, Mary Squires the Gipsey, and Miss Blandy,” says one who remembered their days of celebrity, “were such universal topics in 1752, that you would have supposed it the business of mankind to talk only of them; yet now, in 1790, ask a young man of twenty-five or thirty a question relative to these extraordinary personages, and he will be puzzled to answer.”
Who now knows the steps of that dance, or has heard the name of its author, of which in our father's days it was said in verse that
Isaac's rigadoon shall live as long
As Rafael's painting, or as Virgil's song.
Nay, who reads the poem wherein those lines are found, though the author predicted for them in self-applauding pleasantry, that
Whilst birds in air, or fish in streams we find,
Or damsels fresh with aged partners join'd,
As long as nymphs shall with attentive ear
A fiddle rather than a sermon hear,
So long the brightest eyes shall oft peruse
These useful lines of my instructive muse.
Even of the most useful of those lines, the “uses are gone by.” Ladies before they leave the ball room, are now no longer fortified against the sudden change of temperature by a cup of generous white wine mulled with ginger; nor is it necessary now to caution them at such times against a draught of cold small beer, because as the Poet in his own experience assured them
Destruction lurks within the poisonous dose,
A fatal fever, or a pimpled nose.3
3 SOAME JENYNS.