circumstances of peculiarly favouring chance.
My delight was quite sufficient in having
stumbled upon so many old friends of my childhood,
gathered together under Mr. Chappell's
fostering auspices, and treated by him, not as
the "Bohemians" I might have suspected them
to have been, but as respectable worthies of
high and ancient lineage. It was quite beside
my purpose to wander into any speculation as
to the process by which they had been orally
and traditionally carried down even to our days.
All the fresh feelings of that fanciful old once
upon a time were revived within me on greeting
them again.

I confess that, many as were the years that
had weighed upon me since my childhood, my
heart was strangely stirred within me when,
amidst the songs of Popular Music of the
Olden Time, I stumbled upon Lord Thomas
and Fair Ellinor. What long-slumbering
emotions were reawakened within me by the words,
"Lord Thomas he was a bold forestèr, and a
chaser of the king's deer. Fair Ellinor was a
fine womàn, and Lord Thomas he loved her
dear!" What mattered false rhyme and
misplaced accent? It was the romance of my early
years—the sketch which boyish imagination
had filled up with such vivid colours. The
tangled woods, the flying deer, the coat of
Lincoln green, and the fair damsel with long
hair floating down her back, were all, in an
instant, again before my eyes. How many
other hearts may have thrilled also since the
time of Elizabeth, or much earlier still—for
Ritson conjectures it may have been "originally
a minstrel song"—on hearing the recital of this
eventful history! "Not long since," says the
same author, "a sort of dilapidated minstrel
was to be seen, in the streets of London, who
played upon an instrument he, properly enough,
called a humdrum, and chanted (among others)
the old ballad of Lord Thomas and Fair
Ellinor." This romance of my childhood,
then, "not long since" walked the streets; and
the little ragged boys of Whitechapel and Shoreditch
may have dreamed bright visions of these
illustrious personages, as well as the spoiled
young gentleman, whose curtained bed was
then to him that paradise of song and story
which an opera-box was destined afterwards to
become.

Still more startled was I at the discovery
that my favourite tragic-comedy of the poor
frog who "would a wooing go," and was so
cruelly "gobbled up" by a duck—a ballad only
sung to me on special holidays, and as a farce
after a tragedy—and yet was not that a most
pathetic tragedy in its burlesque form?—was
actually "licensed at Stationers' Hall" so Iong
ago as the year 1580. This serio-comic ballad
had been one of my greatest delights in days
when I little dreamed that poor Froggy went
"a wooing" to his fascinating Mouse as early
as the sixteenth century, and that his lamentable
history had been probably the delectation
of little children, and doubtless grown-up
children likewise, so very many generations ago.
The ballad, licensed to Edward White at
Stationers' Hall in 1580, bore the evidently catching
title of A most strange Wedding of the
Frog and the Mouse; although most certainly
in the version to which I had been so early
accustomed no such happy dénouement as a
wedding took place, the successful issue of the
"wooing" having been tragically prevented by
the fatal catastrophe alluded to above. Many
ballads seem to have been written upon the
same (apparently popular) subject. One begins,
"There was a frog lived in a well, and a farce
(fast?) mouse in a mill;" and, that tradition
assigned Mousey's residence to such a locality,
seems to be borne out by another composition,
mentioned in Wedderburn's Complaint of Scotland,
as early as 1549, as one of the songs sung
by the shepherds of the time, and commencing,
"The Frog came to the mylder" (mill-door).
Amidst a variety of these imitations, Mr. Chappell
begins the ballad, which he apparently
offers as the most authentic, with the words,
"It was a frogge in a well," and only opens the
second verse with, "The frogge he would a
wooing ride." But, as I find that my own
identical "A frog he would a wooing go" is
mentioned among the other versions, and more
especially as I cannot bring my mind to accept
the idea that Froggy would, by any possibility,
ever have lived down in a well, which no decent
frog ever does, or ever bestrode any kind of
steed, I am wilfully induced to maintain the
more correct authenticity of my dear old
nursery song.

There is good reason to believe, it must be
admitted at the same time, that there had crept
into the version of my childhood a variation,
which was of very questionable authenticity,
and apparently of modern date, inasmuch as
Mr. Chappell not only does not attempt to
explain this variation, but does not condescend
to notice the innovation at all. Instead of
the burden "Humble-dum, mumble-dum," and
"Tweedle, tweedle, twino," employed in the
song of Mr. Chappell's book, I remember that
the fancy of my earlier days was wont to be
considerably mystified by one about "Gammon
and spinage," and "Heigho said Rowley." I
remember, too, how my fancy gradually became
reconciled to its own explanation, that "Rowley"
("Anthony" was added in the repetition of the
burden) was the name of the gallant frog, and
that the "Heigho" had reference to his love-sighs.
Fancy likewise endeavoured to content
itself with the notion that the "spinage" had
something to do with the food upon which
Mousey lived. But it could make nothing out
of the "gammon," except with reference to
Mousey's love for bacon, and certainly refused
to give the word any meaning, reflecting upon
the orthodoxy of the legend. This same fancy,
grown older, and more pedantic, has since
sought to attach a political meaning to the song,
and find an allusion to Charles the Second and
his cavalier party in the well-known name of
"Rowley." But in this attempt it has broken
down as completely as with the "gammon."