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Preface and Acknowledgements
to draw my line somewhere between Faradiddle Dyno and
Hallo My Fancy; between If All the World were Paper and
Tom 0'Bedlam's Song; I have printed some of Gilbert's Bab
Ballads but not the Songs of a Savoyard, The Jackdaw of
Rheimsbut not Get up and bar the Door; I have included Mr
Belloc's Lines to a Don but excluded his Verses to a Lord.
A collection ranging over three or four centuries of
comic verse necessarily throws some light on the development
of wit and humour—the subjects on which
people find it necessary or possible to joke about vary
from age to age—but, to use M. Bourget's distinction,
I have preferred the actual to the historical. For that
reason, some comic poems of considerable scholarly
interest have been omitted—for example, Sir John
Suckling's ingenious parody of Shakespeare, and Alexander
Brome's Palinode, in which the poet offers to
forsake the Muse for a business career (and foreshadows
the light verse of a later age):
He that can buy and sell and cheat
May quickly make a shift to get
His thousand pounds per annum;
And purchase, without more ado
The poems, and the poet too.
In most of the poems I have followed the earliest
available text, but once or twice I have preferred a
later and improved reading to one earlier or more authentic.
Thus I have printed the usual Lines on Prince
Frederick though there is a much earlier version addressed
to the family of Lord Chancellor Hyde, and I
have printed the traditional version of Rochester's epigram
on Charles II rather than the one beginning (in
language that was even more insulting than it appears
today): 'Here lies our mutton-eating King.' 1 In the lines
1 It may be worth mentioning that Charles, as usual, had the
last word: 'My sayings are my own, my actions are my ministers'.'
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