“Oh Jessica! in such a night as this we came to town,
And since that night we’ve shar’d but half a crown;
Let you and I then bid these folks good night,
For if we longer stay, they’ll starve us quite.”
This neglect of the drama is not, however, to be attributed to the visitors or the inhabitants at the present day, a very elegant and commodious theatre having been erected in 1814, at a considerable expense, in another part of the town. But even here, a fatality attends our catholic ancestors, indicative of the instability of all sublunary affairs. The theatre has been erected on the site of the cloisters and cemetery of the grey friars’ monastery, the tall, slender tower of which is still standing near, and is the only one remaining out of ten monasteries found in Lynn at the dissolution; where, but for the lustful rapacity of that tyrannical “defender of the faith,” Henry VIII., this sacred asylum of our departed ancestors would not have been profaned, nor their mouldering particles disturbed, by a building as opposite to the one originally erected, as darkness is to light. Thus time, instead of consecrating, so entirely obliterates our veneration for the things of yesterday, that the reflecting mind cannot forbear to exclaim with the moralist of old,—“Sic transit gloria mundi.”
K.
David Love, of Nottingham, Aged 74, A. D. 1824.
David Love, of Nottingham,
Aged 74, A. D. 1824.
“Here’s David’s likeness for his book,
All those who buy may at it look,
As he is in his present state,
Now printed from a copper-plate.”
These lines are beneath the portrait from whence the above [engraving] is taken. It is a very faithful likeness of David Love, only a little too erect:—not quite enough of the stoop of the old man of 76 in it,—but it is a face and a figure which will be recognised by thousands in Nottingham and Nottinghamshire. The race of the old minstrels has been long extinct;—that of the ballad-singers is fast following it—yet David is both one and the other. He is a bard and a caroller,—a wight who has wandered over as many hills and dales as any of the minstrels and troubadours of old;—a man who has sung, when he had cause enough for crying—who has seen many ups and downs, and has seldom failed to put his trials and hardships into rhyme. He is the poet of poverty and patience—teaching experience. He has seen the
“huts where poor men lie”