But I have already tried to demonstrate that this is an intrinsically valuable body of literary material, with which we have to deal, and that it lurks in a wide variety of forms. I have illustrated some of them; but there are yet others—namely, the Ballad and the Nursery Rhyme.
The taste for burlesque in composition set in at a very early period, as will become evident from a perusal of these pages, and may be regarded to some extent as a counter-movement to the practice of moralising secular productions which were thought to be of an irreligious tendency, and to be susceptible of a different kind of treatment, like the New Nutbrown Maid upon the Passion of Christ, the Court of Venus moralized, the Gude and Godly Ballets of our Northern neighbours, and Come over the bourne, Bessy, to me. Of the last, singularly enough, there are two parodies—one political, in which Queen Elizabeth is the heroine, and the other allegorical, in which the speaker is Christ, and Bessy, Mankind. But the original was of an amatory complexion.
Certainly, on the whole, one of the ballads in a printed collection of the reign of James I., entitled Deuteromelia, 1609, affords the most powerful and diverting example of the manner in which our own ancestors handled the present class of undertaking, as well as a proof of the appreciation of the ludicrous by the readers of those days. It is an extremely clever production, which I am tempted to transfer hither entire:—
“Martin said to his man,
Fie! man, fie!
Oh, Martin said to his man,
Who’s the fool now?
Martin said to his man,
Fill thou the cup, and I the can;
Thou hast well drunken, man: