[Page 20.] List, your Nobles, and attend.
This was (perhaps, by John Eliot,) certainly written in anticipatory celebration of the event described, the Reception of Queen Henrietta Maria by the citizens of London, 1625. The full title is this:—“The Author intending to write upon the Duke of Buckingham, when he went to fetch the Queen, prepared a new Ballad for the Fidlers, as might hold them to sing between Dover and Callice.” It is thus the poem reappears, with some variations (beginning “Now list, you Lordlings, and attend, || Unto a Ballad newly penned,” &c.,) among the “Choyce Poems, being Songs, Sonnets, Satyrs, and Elegies. By the Wits of both Universities, London,” &c., 1661, p. 83. This was merely the earlier edition (of June, 1658), reissued with an irregular extra sheet at beginning. The original title-page (two issued in 1658) was “Poems or Epigrams, Satyrs, Elegies, Songs and Sonnets, upon several persons and occasions. By no body must know whom, to be had every body knows where, and for any body knows what. [MS. The Author John Eliot.] London, Printed for Henry Brome, at the Gun in Ivie Lane, 1658.” It is mentioned that “These poems were given me neer sixteen years since [therefore about 1642] by a Friend of the Authors, with a desire they might be printed, but I conceived the Age then too squeemish to endure the freedom which the Author useth, and therefore I have hitherto smothered them, but being desirous they should not perish, and the world be deprived of so much clean Wit and Fancy, I have adventured to expose them to thy view; ... The Author writes not pedantically, but like a gentleman; and if thou art a gentleman of thy own making thou wilt not mislike it.”
Verse 9th. Gondomar was the Spanish Ambassador at the Court of James I., to whom, with his “one word” of “Pyrates, Pyrates, Pyrates,” we in great part owe the slaughter of Raleigh. Of course, the date ’526, four lines lower, is a blunder. The rash visit to Madrid was in March, 1623.
Title, and verse 8th. A Jack-a-Lent was a stuffed puppet, set up to be thrown at, during Lent. Perhaps it was a substitute for a live Cock; or else the Cock-throwing may have been a later “improvement:” See Hone’s Every Day Book, for an illustrated account, i. 249. Trace of the habit survives in our modern “Old Aunt Sally,” by which yokels lose money at Races (although Dorset Rectors try to abolish Country Fairs, while encouragement is given to gambling at Chapel Bazaars with raffles for pious purposes). In the Merry Wives of Windsor, Act iii. sc. 3, Mrs. Page says to the boy, “You little Jack-a-Lent, have you been true to us?” Quarles alludes to the practice:—
How like a Jack-a-Lent
He stands, for boys to spend their Shrove-tide throws,
Or like a puppet made to frighten crows.
(J. O. Halliwell’s M. W. of W., Tallis ed., p. 127.)
John Taylor (the Water-Poet) wrote a whim-wham entitled “Jack a Lent: his Beginning and Entertainment,” about 1619, printed 1630; as “of the Jack of Jacks, great Jack a Lent.” And Cleveland devoted thus a Cavalier’s worn suit: “Thou shalt make Jack-a-Lents and Babies first.” (Poems, 1662, p. 56.)
Martin Llewellyn’s Song on Cock-throwing begins “Cock a doodle doe, ’tis the bravest game;” in his Men-Miracles, &c., 1646, p. 61.