A Mother to her First-born. "Tis sweet to watch thee in thy sleep, When thou, my boy, art dreaming; 'Tis sweet, o'er thee a watch to keep, To mark the smile that seems to creep O'er thee like daylight gleaming. 'Tis sweet to mark thy tranquil breast, Heave like a small wave flowing; To see thee take thy gentle rest, With nothing save fatigue opprest, And health on thy cheek glowing To see thee now, or when awake, Sad thoughts, alas' steal o'er me⚫ For thou, in time, a part must take, That may thy fortunes mar or make, In the wide world before thee. But I, my child, have hopes of thee, And may they ne'er be blighted !— That I, years hence, may live to see Thy name as dear to all as me, Thy virtues well requited. I'll watch thy dawn of joys, and mould In intellectual beauty. And then, perhaps, when I am dead, The Maypole nearest to the metropolis, that stood the longest within the recollection of the editor, was near Kennington-green, at the back of the houses, at the south corner of the Workhouselane, leading from the Vauxhall-road to Elizabeth-place. The site was then nearly vacant, and the Maypole was in the field on the south side of the Workhouse-lane, and nearly opposite to the Black Prince public-house. It remained till about the year 1795, and was much frequented, particularly by milk maids. A delightfully pretty print of a merrymaking "round about the Maypole," supplies an engraving on the next page illustrative of the prevailing tendency of this work, and the simplicity of rural manners. It is not so sportive as the dancings about the Maypoles near London formerly; there is nothing of the boister ous rudeness which must be well remem bered by many old Londoners on May day. The innocent and the unaspiring may always be happy. Their pleasures like their knitting needles, and hedging gloves, are easily purchased, and when bestowed are estimated as distinctions. The late Dr. Parr,the fascinating converser, the skilful controverter, the first Greek scholar, and one of the greatest and most influential men of the age, was a patron of May-day sports. Opposite his parsonage-house at Hatton, near Warwick, on the other side of the road, stood the parish Maypole, which on the annual festival was dressed with garlands, surrounded by a numerous band of villagers. The doctor was "first of the throng," and danced with his parishioners the gayest of the gay. He kept the large crown of the Maypole in a closet of his house, from whence it was produced every May-day, with fresh flowers and streamers preparatory to its elevation, and to the doctor's own appearance in the ring. He always spoke of this festivity a3 one wherein he joined with peculiar delight to itself, and advantage o his neighbours. He was deemed eccentric, and so he was; for he was never proud to the humble, nor humble to the proud. His eloquence and wit elevated humility, and crushed insolence; he was the champion of the oppressed, a foe to the oppressor, a friend to the friendless, and a brother to him who was ready to perish. Though a prebend of the church with university honours, he could afford to make his parishoners happy without derogating from his ecclesiastical dignities, or abatement of self-respect, or lowering himself in the eyes of any who were not inferior in judgment, to the most inferior of the villagers of Hatton. Formerly a pleasant character dressed out with ribands and flowers, figured in village May-games under the name of JACK-O'-THE-Green. The Jack-o'-the-Greens would sometimes come into the suburbs of London, and amuse the residents by rustic danc ing. The last of them, that I remember, were at the Paddington May-dance. near the "Yorkshire Stingo," about twenty years ago, from whence, as I heard, they diverged to Bayswater, Kentish-town, and adjoining neighbourhoods. A Jack-o'the-Green always carried a long walking stick with floral wreaths; he whisked it about in the dance, and afterwards walked with it in high estate like a lord mayor's footman. On this first of the month we cannot pass the poets without listening to their carols, as we do, in our walks, to the songs of the spring birds in their thickets TO MAY. Welcome! dawn of summer's day, The most ancient of our bards makes noble melody in this glorious month. Mr. Leigh Hunt selects a delightful passage from Chaucer, and compares it with Dryden's paraphrase: It is sparkling with young manhood and a gentle freshness. What a burst of radiant joy is in the second couplet; what a vital quickness in the comparison of the horse," starting as the fire;" and what a native and happy case in the conclusion! The busy lark, the messenger of day, Dryden falls short in the freshness and feeling of the sentiment. His lines are beautiful; but they do not come home to us with so happy and cordial a face. Here they are. The word morning in the first line, as it is repeated in the second, we are bound to consider as a slip of the pen; perhaps for mounting. The morning-lark, the messenger of day, And licks the drooping leaves, and dries the dows; "For thee, sweet month, the groves green liveries wear, For thee the Graces lead the dancing hours, And Nature's ready pencil paints the flowers "How poor," says Mr. Hunt," is this to Arcite's leaping from his courser 'with a lusty heart.' How inferior the commonplace of the fiery steed,' which need not involve any actual notion in the writer's mind, to the courser starting as the fire;'-how inferior the turning his face to the rising day,' and raising his voice,' to the singing loud against the sunny sheen; and lastly, the whole learned invocation and adjuration of May, about guiding his wandering steps' and 'so may thy tender blossoms' &c. to the call upon the fair fresh May, ending with that simple, quick-hearted line, in which he hopes he shall get some green here;' a touch in the happiest taste of the Italian vivacity. Dryden's genius, for the most part, wanted faith in nature. It was too gross and sophisticate. There was as much difference between him and his original, as between a hot noon in perukes at St. James's, and one of Chaucer's O dolce primavera, o fior novelli, O thou delicious spring, O ye new flowers, O airs, O youngling bowers; fresh thickening grass, Myrtles, and palms serene, ivies, and bays; And ye who warmed old lays, spirits o' the woods, Sannazzare O quivered virgins bright, Pans rustical, "This time two hundred years ago, our ancestors were all anticipating their May holidays. Bigotry came in, and frowned them away; then debauchery, and identified all pleasure with the town; then avarice, and we have ever since been mistaking the means for the end. Fortunately, it does not follow, that we shall continue to do so. Commerce, while it thinks it is only exchanging commodities, is helping to diffuse knowledge. All other gains,-all selfish and extravagant systems of acquisition,-tend to over-do themselves, and to topple down by their own undiffused magnitude. The world, as it learns other things, may learn not to confound the means with the end, or at least, (to speak more philosophically,) a really poor means with a really richer. The veriest cricket-player on a green has as sufficient a quantity of excitement, as a fundholder or a partizan; and health, and spirits, and manliness to boot. Knowledge may go on; must do so, from necessity; and should do so, for the ends we speak of: but knowledge, so far from being incompatible with simplicity of pleasures, is the quickest to perceive its wealth. Chaucer would lie for hours looking at the daisies. Scipio and Lælius could amuse themselves with making ducks and drakes on the water. Epaminondas, the greatest of all the active spirits of Greece, was a flute-player and dancer. Alfred the Great could act the whole part of a minstrel. Epicurus taught the riches of temperance and intellectual pleasure in a garden. The other philosophers of his country walked between heaven and earth in the colloquial bowers of Academus; and the wisest heart of Solomon,' who found every thing vain because he was a king, has left us panegyrics on the spring and the voice of the turtle,' because he was a poet, a lover, and a wise man.' Aubrey remarks, that he never remembers to have seen a Maypole in France; but he says, "in Holland, they have their May-booms, which are streight young trees, set up; and at Woodstock, in Oxon, they every May-eve goe into the parke, The Indicator. and fetch away a number of hawthornetrees, which they set before their dores: 'tis pity that they make such a destruction of so fine a tree." As the old antiquary takes us to Woodstock, and a novel by the "Great Unknown," bears that title, we will “inn" there awhile, agreeably to an invitation of a correspondent who signs Ωνωφίλτατος, and who promises entertainment to the readers of the Every-Day Book, from an account of some out-of-the-way doings at that place, when there were out-of-theway doings every where. Our friend with the Greek name is critical; for as regards the "new novel," he says, that "Woodstock would have been much better if the author had placed the incidents before the battle of Worcester, and supposed that Charles had been drawn over to England to engage in some plot of Dr. Rochecliffes, which had proved unsuccessful. This might have spared him one great anachronism, (placing the pranks of the merry devil of Woodstock in 1651, instead of 1649,) at the same time that it would throw a greater air of probability over the story; for the reader who is at all acquainted with English history, continually feels his pleasure destroyed by the recollection that in Charles's escapes after the battle of Worcester, he never once visited Woodstock. Nor does the merry devil of Woodstock excite half the interest, or give us half the amusement he would have done, if the author had lately read the narrative I am now about to copy. He seems to have perused it at some distance of time, and then to have written the novel with imperfect recollection of the circumstances.-But let me begin my story; to wit, an article in the British Magazine' for April, 1747, which will I suppose excite some curiosity, and is in the following words : "THE GENUINE HISTORY 'GOOD DEVIL OF WOODSTOCK, "Famous in the world in the year 1649 and never accounted for, or at all understood to this time." The teller of this "Genuine History" proceeds as hereafter verbatim. |