[Page 31.] A Story strange I will you tell.
As to the burden (since some folks are inquisitive about the etymology of Down derry down, or Ran-dan, &c.), we may note that in a queer book, The Loves of Hero and Leander, 1651, p. 3, is a six-line verse ending thus:
“Oh, Hero, Hero, pitty me,
With a dildo, dildo, dildo dee.”
By which we may guess that the Rope-dancer’s Song, in our text, was probably written about, or even before, 1651. Some among us (the Editor for one) saw Madame Sacchi in 1855 mount the rope, although she was seventy years old, as nimbly as when the first Napoleon had been her chief spectator. During the Commonwealth, rope-dancing and tumbling were tolerated at the Red-Bull Theatre, while plays were prohibited. See (Note to p. 210) our Introduction to Westminster Drollery, pp. xv.-xx, and the Frontispiece reproduced from Kirkman’s “Wits,” 1673, representing sundry characters from different “Drolls,” grouped together, viz.: Falstaff and Dame Quickly, from “the Bouncing Knight;” the French Dancing-Master, from the Duke of Newcastle’s “Variety,” Clause, from Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Beggar’s Bush,” Tom Greene as Bubble the Clown uttering “Tu Quoque” from John Cooke’s “City Gallant” (peeping through the chief-entrance, reserved for dignitaries); also Simpleton the Smith, and the Changeling, from two of Robert Cox’s favourite Drolls. We add now, illustrative of practical suppression under the Commonwealth, a contemporary record:—
A Song.
1.
The fourteenth of September
I very well remember,