“Here comes in St. George, St. George
That man of mighty name,
With sword and buckler by my side
I hope to win the game.”
These “western kernes” have it, you see, Mr. Editor, “down along,” to use their own dialect, with those of the thistle. Then, too, we have a fight. Oh! how beautiful to my boyish eyes were their wooden swords and their bullying gait!—then we have a fight, for lo
“Here’s come I, the Turkish knight,
Come from the Soldan’s land to fight,
And be the foe’s blood hot and bold
With my sword I’ll make it cold.”
A vile Saracenic pun in the very minute of deadly strife. But they fight—the cross is victorious, the crescent o’erthrown, and, as a matter of course, even in our pieces of mock valour, duels we have therein—the doctor is sent for; and he is addressed, paralleling again our players of “Scotia’s wild domain,” with
“Doctor, doctor, can you tell
What will make a sick man well?”
and thereupon he enumerates cures which would have puzzled Galen, and put Hippocrates to a “non-plus;” and he finally agrees, as in the more classical drama of your correspondent, to cure our unbeliever for a certain sum.
The “last scene of all that ends this strange eventful history” consists in the entrance of the most diminutive of these Thespians, bearing, as did Æneas of old, his parent upon his shoulders, and reciting this bit of good truth and joculation (permitting the word) by way of epilogue:
“Here comes I, little Johnny Jack,
With my wife and family at my back,
Yet, though my body is but small,
I’m the greatest rogue amongst ye all;
This is my scrip—so for Christmas cheer
If you’ve any thing to give throw it in here.”
This may be but an uninteresting tail-piece to your correspondent’s clever communication, but still it is one, and makes the picture he so well began of certain usages more full of point.
I doat upon old customs, and I love hearty commemorations, and hence those mimics of whom I have written—I mean the mummers—are my delight, and in the laughter and merriment they create I forget to be a critic, and cannot choose but laugh in the fashion of a Democritus, rather than weep worlds away in the style of a Diogenes.