The form of a Le’tanty or Litany, for such mock-petitions as those in our text (not found elsewhere), and in M. D., C., p. 174, continued in favour from the uprise of the Independents (simply because they hated Liturgies), for more than a century. In the King’s Pamphlets, in the various collections of Loyal Songs, Songs on affairs of State, the Mughouse Diversions, Pills to purge State Melancholly, Tory Pills, &c., we possess them beyond counting, a few being attributed to Cleveland and to Butler. One, so early as 1600, “Good Mercury, defend us!” is the work of Ben Johnson.
Verse 1.—The “Brownist’s Veal” refers to Essex calves, and the scandal of one Green, who is said to have been a Brownist. 4.—“From her that creeps up Holbourne hill:” the cart journey from Newgate to the “tree with three corners” at Tyburn. Sic itur ad astra. When, Oct. 1654, Cromwell was thrown from the coach-box in driving through Hyde park, a ballad on “The Jolt on Michaelmas Day, 1654,” took care to point the moral:—
Not a day nor an hour
But we felt his power,
And now he would show us his art;
His first reproach
Is a fall from a coach,
And his last will be from a cart.
(Rump Coll. i. 362.)
Thus also in M. D., C. p. 255: