A PEPYSIAN GARLAND - online book

Black-letter Broadside Ballads Of The years 1595-1639

	54 The father hath beguiled the son Pepys, i, 362, B.L., two woodcuts, four columns. "The father beguild his Sonne" was registered for publication by Francis Coles and his ballad-partners on June 20, 1629. A lost ballad called "The sonne beguils the Father" was registered by Francis Grove on July 3, 1630, and was probably a reply, by Martin Parker himself, to the present work. (Cf. Arber's Transcript, iv, 216, 238.) A tune of The Mother Beguiled the Daughter (cf. Roxburghe Ballads, vn, 161) is often used: the ballad from which it was derived is not known, but I suspect that it, too, was the work of Parker. He was very fond of writing of a subject from various angles, especially when he could in turn satirize men and then women. The tune of Drive the cold winter away is given in Chappell's Popular Music, 1, 194. What basis—whether fact or imagination—Parker had for this doleful tragedy, with its pointed warning to deceitful fathers, is not determined. But the story reads like fiction. The third line, "a spokesman hath woo'd for himself," is an anticipation of a well-known passage in Longfellow's Courtship of Miles Standish. To the tune of Drive the cold Winter away. I Often haue knowne, And experience hath showne, that a spokesman hath woo'd for himselfe And that one rich neighbour Will vnderhand labour to ouerthrow another with pelfe: But I neuer knew,1 Nor I thinke any of you, since wooing and wedding begun, 1 Text has a period.
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