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Page 21
CATNACHERY
Catnach was a dealer in ballads. His stock line was the murderer's
confession, and his standard price half a crown. I don't know that
there is a Catnach now, or a market for Catnachery, but people collect
the old ones. You find them in county anthologies, with one of which
"_The Kentish Garland_, Vol. II., edited by Julia H.L. de Voynes,
Hertford: Stephen Austin and Sons, 1882," I lately spent a pleasant
morning in a friend's house. I should have liked Volume I., though it
could not by any possibility have contained worse matter. That is my
only consolation for missing it, because there are bad things and bad
things, and if a thing of literature is bad enough, it may well be as
entertaining as the best. I have long felt that there was a future for
_Half-hours with the Worst Authors_. It might prove a goldmine to a
resolute editor, and I hope I am not betraying a friend when I say
that one of mine has laid the footings of such a collection as may
some day add lustre to his name.[A] If I don't mistake, I can put him
on to a thing or two now which he will be glad of.
[Footnote A: He is here following Edward FitzGerald.]
Every bad ballad has its archetype in a good one, and all ballads
of whatsoever quality, can be pigeonholed under subjects, whether
of content or of treatment. My first specimen from Kent could be
classified as the Ballad Encomiastic, or, at will, as the Ballad of
Plain Statement, in which latter case it would be considered as a
ballad proper and derive itself _passim_ from Professor Child's
book. In the former case you would have to go back to Homer for its
original. It calls itself "An Epitaphe"--which it could not be--"uppon
the death of the noble and famous Sir Thomas Scott of Scottshall, who
dyed the 30 Dec. 1594," and begins thus:
Here lyes Sir Thomas Scott by name--
O happie Kempe that bore him!
Kempe is his mother.
Sir Reynold with four knights of fame
Lyv'd lynealy before him.
The poet chooses to treat of ladies by their surnames, for we go on:
His wieves were Baker, Heyman, Beere,
His love to them unfayned;
He lived nyne and fiftie yeare.
And seventeen soules he gayned.
Seventeen children, in fact--but
His first wief bore them every one,
The world might not have myst her--
A very obscure line, at first blush rather hard on Baker, and flatly
contradicted by what follows:
She was a very paragone,
The Lady Buckhurst's syster.
Nothing could be more succinct. Now for Beere:
His widow lives in sober sort,
No matron more discreeter;
She still reteines a good report,
And is a great housekeeper.
Apart from his valiancy as a consort Sir Thomas seems to have done
little in the world but be rich in it. The best that can be said of
him by the epigraphist is contained in what follows:
He made his porter shut his gate
To sycophants and briebors,
And ope it wide to great estates,
And also to his neighbours.
That does not recommend Sir Thomas to me. I suspect himself of
sycophancy, if not of briebory, and it may well be that he shut out
others of his kidney in order that he might have free play with the
great estates. But that is not the poet's fault, who had to say what
he could.
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