[_]
While in England verse was made the vehicle of controversy,
and Popery was attacked in it by logical argument,
or stinging satire; we may be sure the zeal of the Scottish
Reformers would not suffer their pens to be idle, but many
a pasquil was discharged at the Romish priests, and their
enormous encroachments on property. Of this kind perhaps is
the following, (preserved in an ancient MS. Collection of
Scottish poems in the Pepysian library:)
Tak a Wobster, that is leill,
And a Miller, that will not steill,
With ane Priest, that is not gredy,
And lay ane deid corpse thame by,
And, throw virtue of thame three,
That deid corpse sall qwyknit be.
Thus far all was fair: but the furious hatred of popery
led them to employ their rhymes in a still more licentious manner.
It is a received tradition in Scotland, that at the
time of the Reformation, ridiculous and baudy songs were
composed to be sung by the rabble to the tunes of the most
favourite hymns in the Latin service Greene sleeves and
pudding pies (designed to ridicule the popish clergy) is
said to have been one of these metamorphosed hymns:
Maggy
Lauder was another:
John Anderson my jo was a third.
The original music of all these burlesque sonnets was very
fine. To give a specimen of their manner, we have inserted
one of the least offensive. The Reader will pardon the
meanness of the composition for the sake of the anecdote,
which strongly marks the spirit of the times.
The adaptation of solemn church music to these ludicrous
pieces, and the jumble of ideas, thereby occasioned, will account
for the following fact.—From the Records of the General
Assembly in Scotland, called, “The Book of the Universal
Kirk,” p. 90. 7th July, 1568, it appears, that
Thomas Bassendyne printer in Edinburgh, printed “a psalme
buik, in the end whereof was found printit ane baudy
sang, called, “Welcome Fortunes
.”
