may seem to halt on crutches,
Yet they’l all merrily please you
for your charge, which not much is.
Who was the “N. D.” to whose light labours we are indebted for the compounding of these “Witty Ballads, jovial Songs, and merry Catches” in Pills warranted to cure the ills of Melancholy, had not hitherto been ascertained[9]; or whether he wrote anything beside the above couplet, and the humorous address To the Reader, beginning,
There’s no Purge ’gainst Melancholy,
But with Bacchus to be jolly:
All else are but dreggs of Folly, &c. ([p. 111.])
As we suspected (flowing though his verse might be), he was more of bookseller than ballad-maker. His injunctions for us to “be wise and buy, not borrow,” had a terribly tradesman-like sound. Yet he was right. Book-borrowing is an evil practice; and book-lending is not much better. Woeful chasms, in what should be the serried ranks of our Library companions, remind us pathetically, in too many cases (book-cases, especially,) of some Coleridge-like “lifter” of Lambs, who made a raid upon our borders, and carried off plunder, sometimes an unique quarto, on other days an irrecoverable duodecimo: With Schiller, we bewail the departed,—
“The beautiful is vanished, and returns not.”