> No one who has seen in the Mitchell Library the broadsheet verse and prose 
> circulated among the old Sydney "pushes" will doubt the ability of the 
> larrikin to express himself in vigorous new ways.

Just in case not everyone is bored out of their mind with this ...

When I read the above, referring to actual Street larrikin verse being found 
in obscure broadsheets, my immediate thought was, "Why am I not surprised?"

Athough it's now just over a century old, easily the best collection of cant 
verse in English is J.S.Farmer's _Musa Pedestris_.

But if you look at that, Farmer's texts jump from "When my dimber dell I 
courted" in 1725 *** to "Come All You Buffers Gay" in 1760.

[Well, Farmer includes a poem by Bamfylde Moore Carew beginning, "I, Crank 
Cuffin, swear to be ..." dated from 1759, but as the text is actually 
composed by Harrison Ainsworth and comes from his novel _Rookwood_ published 
in 1834, we can ignore that.  Just how this particular lulu of a misdating 
comes to pass involves the various versions of the ceremony of The Stalling 
[i.e. installing] of the Rogue, beginning with Thomas Harman in 1567, which 
works its merry way through Thomas Dekker and Richard Head before it finally 
grinds to a crashing halt in Ainsworth.

Jeezus god, I think I may have invented an entirely new way of wasting time. 
I'm thinking of calling it "forensic scholarship" and copyrighting the term.

But to get back, sort of, to the point ...]

Now, that period of 1725 to 1760 wouldn't seem to be that long or 
particularly important, you'd think.  Except that it's exactly the time that 
Street speech finally sticks its not entirely kempt head above the parapet 
in the wake of the hanging of Jack Sheppard in 1724.  You'd think Farmer 
might have noticed this?  Did he buggery.  For Farmer, broadsheet ballads 
flogged in the streets of London might as well not have existed.

But the Street itself didn't forget Jack Sheppard.  Just before he himself 
was hanged in Rhode Island in 1790, Thomas Mount dictated a couple of verses 
from memory that he'd heard sung.  He didn't have the least idea where they 
were from, but he'd heard them and remembered them.

Where they were from originally was a poem entitled "John Sheppard's 
Farewell" and published the day after Sheppard was hanged, beginning [no, 
you won't find it in Farmer], "To the Hundreds of Drury I write ..."

Sixty five years and three thousand miles, and the Street remembered 
Sheppard when the scholars had forgotten him.  The Street has a long memory, 
sometimes.

Admittedly, things get shuffled around a bit -- the original song rapidly 
detaches itself from Sheppard, being given the admittedly more catchy title 
of "The Boman Prig's Farewell" and losing Moll Frisky and Pitchford and his 
fiddle somewhere along the way, but it's still the same damn song that Mount 
is singing nearly seventy years after Sheppard was hanged.

It's amazing what you can find out if you look.  Like, in a note to Canto XI 
of _Don Juan_, Byron remarks that the cant passage there could be explicated 
by his old boxing tutor, Gentleman John Jackson, and quotes a few lines of a 
song Jackson used to repeat.  Byron doesn't say this, and possibly even 
didn't know, but what Gentleman J. Jackson is reciting is "The Dog and Duck 
Rig."

Anyone have access to the latest scholarly edition of Byron to see whether 
that's been picked up on yet?  I keep on meaning to check and see, but I 
never seem to find the time to get round to this.  And anyway I'm not a 
Romantic Poetry Specialist so I don't even know what the current 
state-of-the-art edition of Byron is.  Not my period folks, is my excuse.

Enough of this already.

Robin

***  Don't even ask -- that particular poem is a pastiche probably by the 
compiler of _The New Canting Academy_ (1725) based on poems by Thomas Dekker 
written in the 1620s which themselves are an educated Jacobean writer's 
version of then contemporary cant.  (Well, actually 1560s cant, though 
Dekker is writing in the early 17thC, but let's not quibble.)  Except in the 
NCD they aren't attributed to Dekker.  It gets murkier.  In lots of ways, 
Dekker was too clever for his own good, and demonstrates how having a sense 
of humour can backfire.    R.