D'Urfey said: "The town may da-da-da-mn me as a poet, but they sing my songs for all that."
He collected his songs into six volumes, published under the title of Wit and Mirth, or Pills to Purge Melancholy, which went through several editions. In that for 1719 all the songs in the first two volumes are his own; other songs, many of them folk ballads, he tampered with, and added coarsenesses of his own not in the original. The book was published by Playford, and the melodies are not always correctly printed. Most of his airs were folk melodies; many of them, doubtless, heard by him when he was young in Devonshire, for there they are still employed to ballads he recast.
Writing to Henry Cromwell, 10th April, 1710, Alexander Pope says: "I have not quoted one Latin author since I came down, but have learned without book a song of Mr. Thomas Durfey's, who is your only poet of tolerable reputation in this country. He makes all the merriment in our entertainments, and but for him, there would be so miserable a dearth of catches, that, I fear, they would put either the Parson or me upon making some of 'em. Any man, of any quality, is heartily welcome to the best topeing-table of our gentry, who can roar out some rhapsodies of his works; so that in the same manner as it was said of Homer to his detractors, What! dares any man speak against him who has given so many men to eat? (meaning the rhapsodists who lived by repeating his verses). Thus may it be said of Mr. Durfey to his detractors, Dares any one despise him, who has made so many men drink? Alas, Sir! this is a glory which neither you nor I must ever pretend to. Neither you with your Ovid, nor I with my Statius, can amuse a board of Justices and extraordinary Squires, or gain
