all his life; yet he has never ceased to chant as he proceeded on his painful pilgrimage, like the “nightingale with a thorn in her breast.” It is true, he does not carry his harp to accompany his strains, but he carries his life, “The Life, Adventures, and Experience of David Love, written by Himself. Fifth edition:” and well doth it deserve both its title and sale. A curious, eventful story of a poor man’s it is. First he is a poor parent-deserted lad; then he has wormed himself into good service, and afterwards into a coal-pit, where he breaks his bones and almost crushes out life; then he is a traveller, a shopkeeper, a soldier fighting against the Highland rebels; he falls in love, gets into wedlock and a workhouse, is never in despair, and never out of trouble; with a heart so buoyant, that, like a cork on a boisterous flood, however he might be plunged into the depths, he is sure to rise again to the surface, and in all places and cases still pours out his rhymes—pictures of scenes around him, strange cabins and strange groups, love verses, acrostics, hymns, &c.
“I have composed many rhymes,
On various subjects, and the times,
And call’d the trials of prisoners’ crimes
The cash to bring;
When old I grew, composed hymns,
And them did sing.”
So David sped, and so he speeds now in his 77th year, only that his travels have left him finally fixed at Nottingham. His wars and his loves have vanished; his circle of action has annually become more and more contracted; till, at length, the town includes the whole field of his perambulations, and even that is almost more than his tottering frame can traverse. Yet there he is! and the stranger who visits Nottingham will be almost sure to see him, as represented in the [print], crossing the market-place, with a parcel of loose papers in his hand;—a rhyming account of the last Goose Fair, a flood, an execution, or one of David’s own marriages,—for be it known to thee, gentle reader, that David Love has been a true son of the family of the Loves. He has not sung his amatory lays for naught; he has captivated the hearts of no less than three damsels, and he has various and memorable experience in wives.
David, like many of our modern geniuses, is a Scotchman. He tells us that he was born near Edinburgh, but the precise place he affects not to know. The fact is, he is not very strong in his faith that, as he has tasted the sweets of a parish, he cannot be removed, and thinks it best to keep his birth-place secret: but the spot is Torriburn, on the Forth, the Scotch Highgate. David “has been to mair toons na Torriburn,” as the Scotch say, when they intimate that they are not to be gulled.
After sustaining many characters in the drama of life whilst yet very young, a schoolmaster among the rest, he fairly flung himself and his genius upon the world, and rambled from place to place in Scotland, calling around him all the young ears and love-darting eyes by his original ballads. It was a dangerous life, and David did not escape scatheless.
“At length so very bold I grew,
My songs exposed to public view,
And crowds of people round me drew,
I was so funny;
From side to side I nimbly flew
To catch the money.”
And he caught not only money, but matrimony,—and such a wife! alas! for poor David!
“As she always will rule the roast,
I’d better be tied to a post,
And whipped to death,
Than with her tongue to be so tossed,
And bear her wrath.
She called me both rogue and fool,
And over me she strove to rule;
I sat on the repenting stool—
There tears I shed;
Sad my complaint, I said, O dool!
That e’er I wed.”
The next step evidently enough was enlisting, which he did into the duke of Buccleugh’s regiment; where, he says, he distinguished himself by writing a song in compliment of the regiment and its noble commander, concluding with,
“Now, at the last, what do you think
Of the author, David Love?”