Who’s the fool now?”
Of course, it is easy to condemn such lines as foolish or old-fashioned; but there is nothing else exactly like them in our literature, and they shew the relish for humorous travesty on the part of the English public in the sixteenth century. They obviously do not respond to the later and existing notion of what a Jest is; but they may be regarded as forming an antique type of the songs introduced into the modern extravaganza and burletta, and they fall within the present category as representing one of the shapes which facetious literature assumed, before the Ana existed as a distinct branch of research and source of entertainment.
In ballad-lore there are many other relics of a playful or comic turn, which do not involve any jocular sense or plot, as the Wedding of the Frog and the Mouse, the Wedding of the Fly, and some of the familiar pieces in the Drolleries by the wits of the court of the Stuarts. A playwright once offered a MS. farce to a manager, and assured him, by way of recommendation, that it was no laughing matter. That was a bull; but a story or an idea may be funny without fulfilling the conditions of a jest; and, paradoxical as it may appear, there are cases where jests may be fairly admissible as such without offering a direct provocation to laughter. I refer to the nature, not to the quality, of the performance.
In the Nursery Rhymes of this country, of which Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps has made an excellent collection, there is a good deal that seems suggestive beyond the mere jingle of the verse or even the oddity of the subject. The editor himself, indeed, has indicated numerous instances in which an historical or archaic interest underlies the surface; and it is curious that this is usually latent. The rhymes upon the oldest themes, such as King Arthur, Robin Hood, and Tom Thumb, are by no means the most ancient compositions.
A little quatrain:—
“Three wise men of Gotham,
Went to sea in a bowl;
And if the bowl had been stronger,
My song would have been longer”—
is a remarkable survival of the familiar traditions about the Gothamites, and may be commended for its elliptical succinctness. It is within the bounds of possibility that the author of Jack a Nory had this before him as a model. The conception and structure are so similar. How much is told in a few words! The brush of a Turner could not have wrought a result so instantaneous and impressive. The writer, a true poet, shrinks from harrowing details, and tells the tale with a simplicity almost Druidical.