Part 2 — NOTES.

“All round my hat I vears a green villow, All round my hat for a twelvemonth and a day, And if any van should arsk you the reason vy I vears it, Say, all for my true love that’s far, far away. ’Twas agoin of my rounds on the streets I first did meet her, ’Twas agoin of my rounds that first she met my heye, And I never heard a voice more louder nor more sweeter, As she cried, ‘Who’ll buy my cabbages, my cabbages who’ll buy?’”

There were several more verses, and being set to a very taking air, it was a reigning favourite with the “Social Chucksters” of the day. Even scholars thought it worth turning into Latin verse. I remember reading in some short-lived journal a very clever version of it, the first verse of which ran thus—

“Omne circa petusum sertum gero viridem Per annum circa petasum et unum diem plus. Si quis te rogaret, cur tale sertum gererem, Dic, ‘Omne propter corculum qui est inpartibus.’”

Allusions to the willow, as an emblem of grief, are of a very old date. “Sing all, a green willow must be my garland,” is the refrain of the song which haunted Desdemona on the eve of her death (Othello, act iv. sc. 3). That exquisite scene, and the beautiful air to which some contemporary of Shakespeare wedded it, will make “The Willow Song” immortal.

“Had Byron been alive, or Moore not ceased to write, we should have bidden them look to their laurels. ‘Nonsense,’ says Dryden, ‘shall be eloquent in love,’ and here we find the axiom aptly illustrated, for in this Eastern Serenade are comprised nonsense and eloquence in perfection. But, apart from its erotic and poetical merits, it is a great curiosity, as exhibiting in a very marked manner the singular changes which the stride of civilisation and the bow-string of the Sultan Mahmoud have made in the Turkish language and customs within a very few years. Thus we learn from the writer that a ‘musnud,’ which in Byron’s day was a sofa, now signifies a nightingale. A ‘tophaik,’ which once fired away in Moore’s octosyllabics as a musket, is metamorphosed into a bank of flowers. ‘Zemzem,’ the sacred well, now makes shift as a chemise; while the rallying-cry of ‘Allah-hu’ closes in a stanza as a military cloak. Even ‘Gehenna,’ the place of torment, is mitigated into a valley, rich in unctuous spices. But the most singular of all these transmutations of the Turkish vocabulary is that of the word ‘Effendi,’ which used to be a respectful epithet applied to a Christian gentleman, but is now the denomination of a dog. Most of these changes are certainly highly poetical, and, while we admire their ingenuity, we do not impugn their correctness. But with all respect for the author, the Honourable Sinjin Muff, we think that, in one or two instances, he has sacrificed propriety at the shrine of imagination. We do not allude to such little incongruities as the waving of a minaret, or the watching of a mosque. These may be accounted for; but who—who, we ask with some earnestness, ever heard of cheroots growing ready-made among the grass, or of a young lady keeping an appointment in a scarf trimmed with mutton cutlets? We say nothing to the bold idea of a dragoman, who snaps Eblis in twain, as a gardener might snap a frosted carrot; but we will not give up our own interpretation of ‘kiebaubs,’ seeing that we dined upon them not two months ago at the best chop-house in Constantinople.”