He is gone! he's gone! I never,
No I never shall see him more."
Catnach corruscated into brilliant originality in the next stanza—
"She is gone with her joy—her darling boy,
The son of Leopold, blythe and keen;
She Died the sixth of November,
Eighteen hundred and seventeen."
There is nothing like this in the original Drowned Lover that influenced the opening of his elegy. "Catnach," says Mr. Hindley—the italics are his own—"made the following lines out of his own head!" Our village bards never reached a lower bathos. The reader may perhaps like to hear the story of the lives of some of these old fellows.
One, James Parsons, a very infirm man, over seventy, asthmatic and failing, has been a labourer all his life, and for the greater part of it on one farm. His father was famed through the whole country side as "The Singing Machine," he was considered to be inexhaustible. Alas! he is no more, and his old son shakes his head and professes to have but half the ability, memory, and musical faculty that were possessed by his father. He can neither read nor write. From him I have obtained some of the earliest melodies and most archaic forms of ballads. Indeed the majority of his airs are in the old church modes, and generally end on the dominant. At one time his master sent him to Lydford on the edge of Dartmoor, to look after a farm he had bought. Whilst there, Parsons went every pay-day to a little moorland tavern, where the miners met to drink, and there he invariably got his "entertainment" for his singing. "I'd been zinging there," said he, "one evening till I got a bit fresh, and I thought 'twere time for me to be off. So I stood up to go, and then one chap, he said to me, 'Got to the end o' your zongs, old man?' 'Not I,' said I, 'not by a long ways; but I reckon it be time for me to be going.' 'Looky here, Jim,' said he. 'I'll give you a quart of ale for every fresh song you sing us to-night.' Well, your honour, I sat down again, and I zinged on—I zinged sixteen fresh songs, and that chap had to pay for sixteen quarts."
"Pints, surely," I said.