Newgate he builded faire,
For prisoners to live in;
Christs-Church he did repaire,
Christian love for to win.
Many more such like deedes 125
Were done by Whittington;
Which joy and comfort breedes,
To such as looke thereon.
Lancashire, thou hast bred
This flower of charity: 130
Though he be gon and dead
Yet lives he lastingly.
Those bells that call'd him so,
"Turne again, Whittington,"
Call you back many moe 135
To live so in London.
[109]. made.
[CATSKIN'S GARLAND, OR, THE WANDERING YOUNG GENTLEWOMAN.]
Moore's Pictorial Book of Ancient Ballad Poetry, p. 596.
Only in a very debased form is this enchanting tale preserved by English tradition. The following ballad is given, in the collection cited above, from a modern broadside, but has here received a few improvements from two other copies cited by the editor. Mr. Halliwell has printed another version of Catskin in The Nursery Rhymes of England, p. 48, Percy Society, vol. iv. The story is possessed by almost every nation in Europe. It is found not only among the Northern races, but among the Hungarians, Servians, Wallachians, Welsh, Italians, and French. In Germany it is current in a great variety of forms, the two most noteworthy of which are Aschenputtel, to which correspond Cennerentola in the Pentamerone (i. 6), the Cendrillon of Perrault, and the Finette Cendron of Madame d'Aulnoy; and Allerlei-Rauh, which is the same as the Peau d'Ane of Perrault, the She-Bear of the Pentamerone (ii. 6), and the Doralice of Straparola (i. 4).—See the Grimms' Kinder-und-Haus-Märchen, No. 21, 65, and notes in vol. iii.; also the Swedish story of The Little Gold Shoe, and The Girl clad in Mouse-skin, from the Danish, in Thorpe's Yule Tide Stories, pp. vii. 112, 375.
PART I.
You fathers and mothers, and children also,
Come near unto me, and soon you shall know
The sense of my ditty, for I dare to say,
The like hasn't been heard of this many long day.
This subject which to you I am to relate, 5
It is of a 'squire who had a large estate;
And the first dear infant his wife she did bare,
Was a young daughter, a beauty most fair.