To cry down the use of jesting and hums.
Our ballad (believe 't) is no stranger than true;
Mum Salter is sober, and Jack Martin too,
And so the Commencement grows new.
How the Commencement, &c., belongs to the same group as the Mark Antony poems and Square-Cap, and there is the same ambiguity between four anapaests and five iambs. You would certainly take line 1 as it stands in 1677 with ''Tis' for 'It is', and probably as it stands here, for a heroic if line 2 did not come to undeceive you. And this line 2 is bad as either.
First printed in 1653. MS. copies are found in Rawlinson MS. Poet. 147, pp. 48-9, and Tanner MS. 465, fol. 83, of the Bodleian. Neither copy is good, but each helps to restore the text (see ll. 18 and 38). The Tanner MS. also has on fol. 44 an indignant poem 'Upon Mr. Cl. who made a Song against the DDrs', beginning
Leave off, vain Satirist, and do not think,
To stain our reverend purple with thy ink.
It adds the interesting evidence that the poem became a popular song at Cambridge:
Must gitterns now and fiddles be made fit,