In a collection of Poems entitled “Folly in Print”—(which title might be sufficiently appropriate for many such collections)—or a Book of Rhymes, printed in 1667, there is a Ballad called the Northern Lass, or the Fair Maid of Doncaster. Neither book or ballad has ever fallen in my way, nor has that comedy of Richard Broome's, which from its name Oldys supposed to have been founded upon the same story. I learn however in a recent and voluminous account of the English Stage from the Revolution (by a gentleman profoundly learned in the most worthless of all literature, and for whom that literature seems to have been quite good enough,) that Broome's play has no connection with the ballad, or with Doncaster. But the note in which Oldys mentions it has made me acquainted with this Fair Maid's propensity for dancing, and with the consequences that it brought upon her. Her name was Betty Maddox; a modern ballad writer would call her Elizabeth, if he adopted the style of the Elizabethan age; or Eliza if his taste inclined to the refinements of modern euphony. When an hundred horsemen wooed her, says Oldys, she conditioned that she would marry the one of them who could dance her down;

You shall decide your quarrel by a dance,1

but she wearied them all; and they left her a maid for her pains.

Legiadria suos fervabat tanta per artus,
Ut quæcunque potest fieri saltatio per nos
Humanos, agili motu fiebat ab illâ.2

1 DRYDEN.

2 MACARONICA.

At that dancing match they must have footed it till, as is said in an old Comedy, a good country lass's capermonger might have been able to copy the figure of the dance from the impressions on the pavement.

For my own part I do not believe it to be a true story; they who please may. Was there one of the horsemen but would have said on such occasion, with the dancing Peruvians in one of Davenant's operatic dramas,

Still round and round and round,
Let us compass the ground.
What man is he who feels
Any weight at his heels,
Since our hearts are so light, that, all weigh'd together,
Agree to a grain, and they weigh not a feather.

I disbelieve it altogether, and not for its want of verisimilitude alone, but because when I was young there was no tradition of any such thing in the town where the venue of the action is laid; and therefore I conjecture that it is altogether a fictitious story, and may peradventure have been composed as a lesson for some young spinster whose indefatigable feet made her the terror of all partners.