XVIII.
THE FRIAR OF ORDERS GRAY.
Dispersed thro' Shakespeare's plays are innumerable little fragments of ancient ballads, the entire copies of which could not be recovered. Many of these being of the most beautiful and pathetic simplicity, the Editor was tempted to select some of them, and with a few supplemental stanzas to connect them together, and form them into a little tale, which is here submitted to the reader's candour.
One small fragment was taken from Beaumont and Fletcher.
[Ritson exhibits a bit of grim humour in his Ancient Songs, vol. ii. ed. 1829, p. 64, where he prints a parody of Percy's Friar of Orders Gray, under the title of the Jovial Tinker, and prefixes to it the exact words that Percy uses above. The parody commences—
"It was a jovial tinker,
All of the north countrie,
As he walk'd forth, along the way
He sung right merrily.">[
It was a friar of orders gray
Walkt forth to tell his beades;
And he met with a lady faire
Clad in a pilgrime's weedes.