The title of “Pills to Purge Melancholy” was by Playford and Tom D’Urfey afterwards employed, and kept alive before the public, in many a volume from before 1684 until 1720, if not later. Whether “N. D.” himself were the “Mer[cury] Melancholicus” whose name appears as printer, for the book to be “sold in London and Westminster,” is to us not doubtful. By April 18, 1661,[10] Thomason had secured his copy, and there need be no question that it was for sport, and not through any fear of rigid censorship or malicious pettifogging interference by the law, that, instead of printer’s name, this pseudonym or nickname was adopted.
We believe that the mystery shrouding the personality of “N. D.” can be dispelled. The discovery helps us in more ways than one, and connects the Antidote against Melancholy, of 1661, in an intelligible and legitimate manner, with much jocular literature of later date. To us it seems clear that N. D. was no other than [He]n[ry] [Playfor]d. The triplets addressed in 1661 To the Reader, beginning “There’s no purge ’gainst Melancholy,” are repeated at commencement of the 1684 edition of “Wit and Mirth; or, an Antidote to Melancholy” (the third edition of “Pills to Purge Melancholy”) where they are entitled “The Stationer to the Reader,” and signed, not “N. D.,” but “H. P.;” for Henry Playford, whose name appears in full as publisher “near the Temple Church.” Thus, the repetition or alteration of the original title, “An Antidote against Melancholy, made up in Pills,” or, as the head-line puts it, “Pills to Purge Melancholy,” was, in all probability, a perfectly business-like reproduction of what Playford had himself originated. What relation Henry Playford was to John Playford, the publisher of “Select Ayres,” “Choice Ayres,” 1652, &c., we are not yet certain. Thirteen of the longest and most important poems from the 1661 Antidote[11] re-appear in that of 1684, beside four of the Catches. Indeed, the transmission of many of these Lyrics (by the editions of 1699, 1700, 1706, 1707) to the six volume edition, superintended by Tom D’Urfey in 1719-20, is unbroken; though we have still to find the edition published between 1661 and 1684.
But even the 1661 Antidote is not entitled to bear the credit of originating the phrase: Pills to purge Melancholy. So far as we know, by personal search, this belongs to Robert Hayman, thirty years earlier. Among his Quodlibets, 1628, on p. 74, we find the following epigram:—
“To one of the elders of the Sanctified Parlour of Amsterdam.
Though thou maist call my merriments, my folly,
They are my Pills to purge my melancholy;
They would purge thine too, wert thou not foole-holy.”
