O'er hedge and lands, thro' pools and ponds. I whirry, laughing, ho, ho, ho! When lads and lasses merry be, With possets and with juncates fine; I eat their cakes and sip their wine; The maids I kiss; they shrieke,- Who's this? Yet now and then, the maids to please, At midnight I card up their wooll; And while they sleepe and take their ease, I grind at mill their malt up still; When house or harth doth sluttish lye, When any need to borrowe ought, If, to repay, they do delay, With pinchings, dreames, and ho, ho, ho! When lazie queans have nought to do, THE MERRY PRANKS OF ROBIN GOODFELLOW, TO THE TUNE OF DULCINEA.1 FROM Oberon, in fairye land, The king of ghosts and shadowes there, Am sent to viewe the night-sports here. And make good sport, with ho, ho, ho! More swift than lightening can I flye Each thing that's done belowe the moone: Whene'er such wanderers I meete, As from their night-sports they trudge home: And call them on, with me to roame Thro' woods, thro' lakes, thro' bogs, thro' brakes; Or else, unseen, with them I go, All in the nicke to play some tricke And frolicke it, with ho, ho, ho! Sometimes I meete them like a man; This title is given by Bishop Percy from an old black-letter copy in the British Museum. H O'er hedge and lands, thro' pools and ponds. I whirry, laughing, ho, ho, ho! When lads and lasses merry be, With possets and with juncates fine; I eat their cakes and sip their wine; The maids I kiss; they shrieke,- Who's this? Yet now and then, the maids to please, At midnight I card up their wooll; And while they sleepe and take their ease, I grind at mill their malt up still; If, to repay, they do delay, With pinchings, dreames, and ho, ho, ho! When lazie queans have nought to do, But study how to cog and lye; 'Twixt one another secretlye: I marke their gloze, and it disclose Their duckes and geese, and lambes and sheepe; And seeme a vermine taken so; But when they there approach me neare, I leap out laughing, ho, ho, ho! By wells and rills, in meadowes greene, Fiends, ghosts, and sprites, who haunt the nightes, And beldames old my feates have told; So, Vale, Vale! ho, ho, ho!? This ballad has been generally attributed to Ben Jonson and Mr. Collier has a version in a manuscript of the time, with the initials B. J. at the end. This copy, he says, varies some. what from that given above, and has an additional stanza, which we subjoin: "When as my fellow elfes and I In circled ring do trip around, Do happen to be seene or found; Each night I do put groat in shoe, And wind out laughing, ho, ho!" H. INTRODUCTION ΤΟ LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST. LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST was first published in a quarto pamphlet of thirty-eight leaves in 1598, the title-page reading as follows: "A pleasant-conceited Comedy called Love's Labour's Lost: As it was presented before her Highness this last Christmas: Newly corrected and augmented: By W. Shakespeare. Imprinted at London by W. W. for Cuthbert Burby: 1598." There was no other known edition of the play till the folio of 1623, where it is the seventh in the division of Comedies. From the repetition of certain errors of the press, it is quite probable that the second copy was reprinted from the first; while, on the other hand, there are certain differences tha: look as if another authority had in some points been consulted: the editors of the folio probably taking the quarto as their standard, and occasionally having recourse to a play-house manuscript. In the quarto neither scenes nor acts are distinguished; in the folio only the latter; and even here, as may easily be seen, the division into acts is very unequal and inartificial: yet no modern edition has ventured upon any change in this respect. In the Accounts of the Revels at Court, under the date of January, 1605, occurs the following entry : " Between New-years Day and Twelfth Day, a play of Love's Labour's Lost." As success on the public stage was generally at that time the main reason of a play's being selected for performance at court, we may infer that this play continued popular after many better ones had been written. The play was also entered in the Stationers' Books, January 22, 1607, the right of it being passed over from Burby to Ling, probably because the latter contemplated a new edition. The design, however, if any such there were, seems to have been given up, as no impression of that date has come down to us. Love's Labour's Lost is mentioned in the list of Shakespeare's plays given by Francis Meres in 1598. The same year one Robert |