and to the ballads in the Gorgious Gallery[1] called "The Louer exhorteth his Lady to bee constant, to the Tune of Attend thee go play thee," and "The Louer wounded with his Ladies beauty craueth mercy, to the Tune of where is the life that late I led." A mere glance at the two sets of ballads turns Mr. Crawford's statement like a boomerang against him, and shows indisputably that No. 4 had been published at least before 1578, the date of the Gallery; for it begins "Attend thee, go play thee," and this is the tune of one of the Gallery ballads. "The Louer exhorteth his Lady to bee constant," therefore, cannot possibly have been written before No. 4 was printed. Nos. 6 and 23, as the notes below will show, had almost certainly appeared before the Pleasant Sonnets was licensed in 1566.
There is every reason to believe that the Handfull was actually issued in 1566. The absence of a license-fee is not unprecedented,[2] and the difference in title between the 1566 entry and the 1584 edition is of no importance. The Gorgious Gallery itself was registered under two other names before its present title was decided on;[3] and it should be observed that the running title of both the Handfull and the single leaf discovered by Ebsworth is "Sonets and Histories, to sundrie new Tunes," a title much more appropriate for the 1566 entry than for the Handfull itself. This single leaf beyond all doubt belonged to a different edition: it has the page signature D 2, and bears the last three stanzas of No. 22, all of No. 23, and the first twelve lines of No. 24, and thus corresponds exactly (save that it has one additional line) to sign. D 4 and verso of the Handfull. The edition to which it belonged, then, presumably had two signatures, or four pages, fewer than the Handfull; and as three or four of the ballads printed in the latter before sign. D 4 can beyond all question be proved to have been written after the year 1572, it seems probable that this leaf was part of an edition earlier than that of 1584, perhaps of the 1566 Pleasant Sonnets.[4] The title-page of the Handfull, it is almost superfluous to
- ↑ Collier's reprint, pp. 49, 51.
- ↑ See the Stationers' Registers for the year 1588, when no license-fees are given for about half of the entries.
- ↑ See Trans., II, 313.
- ↑ But there were many editions of the Handfull later than 1584. It was registered for publication on July 3, 1601; December 13, 1620; August 4, 1626;
