Note 162 — PART II.

Edward Fitzball, besides being the prolific author of the most sulphurous and sanguinary melodramas, flirted also with the Muses. His triumph in this line was the ballad, “My Jane, my Jane, my pretty Jane,” who was for many long years implored in the delightful tenor notes of Sims Reeves “never to look so shy, and to meet him, meet him in the evening when the bloom was on the rye.” Fitzball, I have heard, was the meekest and least bellicose of men, and this was probably the reason why he was dubbed by Bon Gaultier “the terrible Fitzball.”