But let them prove it if they can,
As for our proof it’s not at all hard—
He was a swapping, swapping Mallard.
Chorus, etc.
“Then let us drink and dance a Galliard
Unto the memory of the Mallard,
And as the Mallard dives in pool,
Let’s dabble, duck, and dive in bowl.”
Chorus, etc.
So for three hundred years, if not for four, has Lord Mallard annually chanted. But the last time that we have proof of a procession having gone round the College with torches, pursuing the mock search for the bird, is in 1801, when Bishop Heber, then a scholar of Brazenose, mentions in a letter home that he had witnessed the scene from his windows across the Radcliffe Square.