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SIR JOHN SUCKLING
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| swarmed so thick to pester the streets, as they doe now, till the yeare 1605.' | ||
| 29. | Against Fruition. | |
| l. 5. | camelion] Cf. Two Gentlemen of Verona, II., iv. 26; Hamlet, III., ii. 98. For the tradition, see Ovid, Metamm., xv. 411: 'Id quoque, quod ventis animal nutritur et aura, Protinus assimulat tetigit quoscumque colores.' Sir Thomas Browne, Pseud. Epid., iii. 21, discusses the legend at length. | |
| A Ballad upon a Wedding. | ||
| See note above, Upon my Lord Brohall's Wedding. The wedding took place in 1641: New Eng. Dict. quotes ll. 19-21 from G. H., Witts' Recreations, 1640 (? O.S.), in which the poem appeared, 'accompanied by a woodcut of two ploughmen or rustics, the one narrating, the other listening' (Hazlitt). W. W. pronounces the ballad Suckling's 'opus magnum; indeed, for grace and simplicity it stands unrivalled in the whole compass of ancient or modem poetry.' Hazlitt mentions lines called 'Three merry boys of Kent,' occurring in Folly in Print, or a Book of Rhymes, 1667, to the tune of an old song beginning thus, 'I rode from England into France' (cf. opening of Cantilena Politico-Jocunda below), or to the tune of Sir John Suckling's Ballad; and lines to the tune of 'I tell thee, Dick, where I have been,' in Patrick Carey's Trivia, 1651. 'Dick' is usually identified with Lovelace. | ||
| ll. 7-9. | At Charing Cross . . . stairs] Northampton House, built by Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, in James I.'s reign, passed, on his death in 1614, to his nephew, Thomas, Earl of Suffolk, grandfather to the bride of this poem. It was now known as Suffolk House. In 1642, the year after this wedding, the bride's sister, Elizabeth, married Algernon, tenth Earl of Northumberland, and brought the house into her husband's family, in which it remained, as Northumberland House, till its destruction in 1874. The 'place where we do sell our hay' is the Haymarket: Hazlitt says that his uncle, Mr. Reynell, who died in 1892, at the age of ninety-three, told him | |
