Get me; I cannot tell what to do else, by my soul, that
I cannot; for I have went and gone to one Lilly’s;
He lives at that house, at the end of another house,
By the May-pole house; and tells every body by one
Star, and t’other Star, what good luck they shall have.
But he cou’d not tell nothing for poor Teg.”
(The Committee, Act i.)
Verse 12. The Master of the Rolls. This was Sir Dudley Digges, builder of Chilham Castle, near Canterbury, Kent, who had in 1627 moved the impeachment of the Duke of Buckingham, and been rewarded with this Mastership.
Verse 18. Alludes to the rigorous suppression of the Play-houses ([vide ante p. 285], for a descriptive Song); and as we see from verse 17, the Bear-garden, like Rope-dancers and Tumblers, met more tolerance than actors (except from Colonel Pride). Not heels were feared, but heads and hands. Bears, moreover, could not stir up men to loyalty, but tragedy-speeches might. One Joshua Gisling, a Roundhead, kept bears at Paris Garden, Southwark.
23. “Goodman Lenthall,” “neither wise nor witty,” (“that creeps to the house by a backdoor,” Rump, ii. 185,) the Speaker of the Commons from 1640 to 1653; Alderman Allen, the dishonest and bankrupt goldsmith, both rebuked by Cromwell, when he forcibly expelled the Rump. (See the ballad on pp. 62-5 of M. D., C., verses 9 and 10, telling how “Allen the coppersmith was in great fear. He had done as [i.e. us] much hurt,” &c.; also 2, 15, for the dumb-foundered “Speaker without his Mace.”) This Downfall of the Rump had been on April 20th, 1653, not quite three months before the funeral of Dean. Whoever may have been the writer of this spirited ballad, we believe, wrote the other one also: judging solely by internal evidence.