_What do I mean: What thoughts do me misguide?_ _As well upon a staff may Witches ride_ _Their fancy’d Journies in the Ayr,_ _As I sail round the Ocean in this Chair:_ _’Tis true; but yet this Chair which here you see,_ _For all its quiet now and gravitie,_ _Has wandred, and has travail’d more_ _Than ever Beast, or Fish, or Bird, or ever Tree before._ _In every Ayr, and every Sea ’t has been,_ _’T has compos’d all the Earth, and all the Heavens ’t has seen._ _Let not the Pope’s it self with this compare,_ _This is the only Universal Chair._
It must have been written before 1661, as it appears among the “_Choyce Poems, being Songs, Sonnets, &c._”, printed for Henry Brome, (who ten years afterwards published _Westm. Droll._) at the Gun in Ivie Lane, in that year. It is in the additional opening sheet, p. 13; not found in the 1658 editions of _Choyce Poems_.
_Westminster-Drollery_ Appendix, p. liv. “_The Green Gown_,” Pan, _leave piping, &c._
Under the title “The Fetching Home of May,” we meet an early ballad-form copy in the Roxburghe Collection, i. 535, printed for J. Wright, junior, dwelling at the upper end of the Old Bailey. It begins “Now _Pan_ leaves piping,” and is in two parts, each containing five verses. Three of these are not represented in the _Antidote_ of 1661. Wm. Chappell, the safest of all guides in such matters, notes that “the publisher [of the broadside] flourished in and after 1635. No clue remains to the authorship.” (_Bd. Soc._ reprint, iii. 311, 1875.)
As in the case of the companion-ditty, “Come, Lasses and Lads” (_Westm. Droll._, ii. 80), we may feel satisfied that this lively song was written before the year 1642. No hint of the Puritanic suppression of Maypoles can be discerned in either of them. Such sports were soon afterwards prohibited, and if ballads celebrating their past delights had then been newly written, the author must have yielded to the temptation to gird at the hypocrites and despots who desolated each village green. We cannot regard the _Roxburghe Ballad_ as being superior to the _Antidote_ version: But they mutually help one another in corrections. We note the chief: first verse, So lively _it_ passes; _Good lack_, what paines; 2, _Thus_ they so much; 3 (our 4), Came very _lazily_. It is after the five verses that differences are greatest. Our 6th verse is absent, and our 7th appears as the 8th; with new 6th, 7th, 9th, and 10th, which we here give, but print them to match our others: