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It is indeed by "Anon", Patrick. Pushing Andrew's research one stage further leads us to a nineteenth century New York magazine called Life. (Published every Thursday. $5 a year in advance. Rejected contributions will be destroyed unless accompanied by a stamped and directed envelope.) In Volume 9, issue number 214, published on February 3, 1887, we find our orphaned lyric, with the title, "A Millionaire Tucre": https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.c2577364;view=1up;seq=86 The poem gets picked up and reprinted in various American newspapers in the next few years, and eventually, losing its title along the way, ends up in the Wordsworth Anthology that Andrew identified. The kicker here is the Hathi Trust. While texts digitised by google and flagged as "snippet" by the regular google search engine can be found there in full (as with the case of issues of Life), the contents of the Hathi site seem to be invisible, so you have to go there directly to find what you want. Eventually, it becomes possible to guess with a fair degree of accuracy when it's worth checking out Hathi. The Hathi site is actually a resource worth knowing about -- without it, I wouldn't have been able to construct [in progress] a detailed chronology of the development of the Newgate Calendar. I eventually got fed up with coming across the all-too-often-repeated statement, "The first example of the Newgate Calendar was issued by Swindels in 1702." The first part of the quoted sentence is virtually meaningless, and the second part is utterly wrong. I eventually got fed-up waiting for someone to do something about this, and decided to take it on myself. Which was probably a mistake, as investigating the bibliographical background of the series of texts which come to be collectively referred to as "the Newgate Calendar" is like digging into a cesspit of alligators. It did, however, lead me to David Mallet. Mallet has to be one of the most subversive writers I've ever encountered -- as a reporter and printer of trials at the Old Bailey, he had a habit of larding his accounts with examples of criminal cant, using terms for the first time in print without bothering to explain what they meant. He also, among other things, authored and printed a work called The night-walkers declaration: or, The distressed whores advice to all their sisters in city and country. (1676). This begins as a conventional moral account put into the mouth of a working woman, but ends with some incredibly specific advice as to what to do if you find yourself in such an unfortunate situation -- don't wear white as this is a dead giveaway, and you'll be banged-up in Bridewell faster than you can say Jack Hall, so wear green or brown; work the outskirts of London rather than the city itself, as you'll have better trade that way; if you work by day rather than at night, you're less likely to be picked up by the Watch ... How Mallet managed to get this past the notoriously litigious censor, Roger L'Estrange, I do not know. At least two and possibly more of his fellow printers who were involved in publishing reports of the trials at the Old Bailey were themselves hauled before the courts for publishing seditious libels, but Mallet himself was never fingered. Cautious as well as subversive ... Robin ____________________ > On 05 September 2016 at 12:03 Patrick McManus <[log in to unmask]> > wrote: > > > Andrew thanks maybe by my favourite prolific 'Anon' > > > On 05/09/2016 11:44, Andrew Bailey wrote: > > > > can't help with authorship, but there's the rest of the > > > limerick here: > > > https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=f3-O64MBeXsC&lpg=PA185&ots=aBWtz8FN8i&dq=%22said%20a%20maid%20I%20will%20marry%20for%20lucre%22&pg=PA185#v=onepage&q=%22said%20a%20maid%20I%20will%20marry%20for%20lucre%22&f=false > > > > >