The Life of Thomas Hardy
down by Hardy as he remembered it played in his father's spacious house when he himself was a four-year-old—in 1844. Astounding memory!
It is a delightful little musical folk-piece. The fashionable young gentleman cannot win the fashionable young lady's love. He appeals to Jan, the old rustic, for advice. Jan, in each succeeding stanza, advises his "measter" to offer higher inducements: a "fine silken gown," the wealth of London City, the keys of Canterbury, and finally the keys to his heart, whereupon he is accepted by the haughty fair. Between verses the three execute a beautifully grotesque dance, a "set-to" and a "hey," to the sprightly tune of Nancy's Fancy.
Finally, the ancient traditional play of St. George, a folk-diversion, almost a ritual, with its roots far back in the Middle Ages. The version here given is slightly more elaborate than the one which Hardy introduced so dramatically in The Return of the Native. Here the Dorset mummers, in their true costumes, bedizened with knots and rosettes of ribbons, panoplied with wooden swords and ridiculously inappropriate trappings, are on really familiar ground. Old Father Christmas (the Prologue), the Dragon (who supplies most of the slapstick comedy with his tail, carefully carried in his hand), the luscious Daughter of the Queen of Egypt, the four valiant British saints, Captain Slasher, the Doctor (who brings all the fallen to life with his pills), and the rest, combine in merriment to set forth a work of popular art as true as it is hilarious and entertaining.
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