SONG LV. THE RIMSEY OLD MAN.
Burton wheel grinders declare upon honour
That Patty's front room lets for more than a hull;
Not without reason they cry fie upon her,
And jovial sing thus when their pitcher is full:—
I saw John wonderful diligent,
Taking dimensions of Patty's front tenement,
When to the parlour door tip-toe I peeping went,
At the lascivious rimsey old man.
CHORUS.
Man, says one, look into chronology,
Scale the wild mountains of his genealogy,
Asses and goats, without any apology,
Were his forefathers, deny it who can.
John knows adultery's strictly forbidden,
Yet still he presumes to transgress the command,
As if it could from Omniscience be hidden,
He acts like a he-goat that can't understand.
The people all round cry in sincerity,
He is the vilest of Adam's posterity,
Treat him, they say, with the utmost severity,
He's a lascivious rimsey old man.
Joseph retreats, and stands pimp with submission,
While John runs flaming with lust to his wife;
Patty was always of that disposition,
She ne'er was content with one man in her life.
Lust for lust, as it is rendered,
And when repeatedly they have engendered,
Patty by Joe is embraced when tendered
By that lascivious rimsey old man.
John some time since had a tenant a grinder
Whose wife paid the rent, if the neighbours don't lie;
Strict in an article he did bind her,
To go for acquittance five stories high.
This she did, looking for recompense,
And then indicted him, risking the consequence:
John was the scribe, the devil the evidence,—
O that lascivious rimsey old man.
Much like a fox by the huntsman's tantivy,
He's oft been put up when the trees were in leaf,
Hedges and woods to his whoredoms are privy,
As thus sung the birds in Clay-wood and Burngreave.
Johnny, whose ways are all iniquity,
Often goes there with his whores in obscurity,
Taking no thought in the least of futurity,—
He's a lascivious rimsey old man.
John I presume has no more felicity
Than the wild jackass that ranges the moors,
His element is a vast multiplicity
Of most abandoned adulterous whores.
Since his choice is their society,
Daily embracing forbidden variety,
May we not say with the strictest propriety,
He is a mischevious rimsey old man?
