dates at circa 1559.[1] L. Gibson is without doubt the Leonard Gibson who signed his ballad, "A very proper Dittie, To the tune of Lightie Loue," with the full name. His Tower of Trustinesse, a work in prose and verse, is dated 1555 in Lilly's Ballads, p. xxx, and 1534 in Hazlitt's Handbook, p. 228. Another work is dated 1582 in Ritson's Bibliographia Poetica, p. 219, and in Crawford's Englands Parnassus, p. xx. The "proper Dittie" was printed by Richard Jones (fl. 1564–1602) without date (Lilly, p. 113). If no more facts are forthcoming, it is not unreasonable to suppose that No. 2 was included in the 1566 Pleasant Sonnets, especially since a Leonard Gibson, almost certainly our balladist, was a student and chorister at New College, Oxford, in 1564-65 (cf. Clark's Register of Oxford, II, ii, 22; Foster's Alumni Oxonienses, Early Series, II, 562). Perhaps his study at Oxford suggested the "Tantara," which, as Professor Kittredge has reminded me, was a phrase well known, because "At tuba horribili sonitu taratantara dixit," a sentence in a fragment of Ennius, was quoted by Priscian. For other uses of "Tantara," see McKerrow's Nashe, I, 118, II, 310, IV, 290; Lilly's Ballads, pp. 105, 292; Tottel's Miscellany, ed. Arber, p. 120; Marriage of Wit and Wisdom, 1579 (Shakespeare Society ed., pp. 59-61); Collier's Extracts, II, 81, 187-8 (Trans., II, 348,434).
It is pleasant, and easy, to identify this Richardson who left Cambridge because 'love caught him from his books,' and who wrote this ballad of warning "because that he sufficiently hath tried the female kind"! In the ninth stanza he writes:
Here Cambridge now I bid farewell, / adue to Students all:
Adue vnto the Colledges, / and vnto Gunuil Hall.
Thanks to this, he can unquestionably be identified with the Thomas Richardson, aged eighteen, who was admitted pensioner to Caius College on April 28, 1572 (Biog. Hist. of Gonville and Caius
- ↑ Many of the ballads in this MS. were licensed at Stationers' Hall during 1560–66, however. Various interesting facts about the manuscript, some of which have considerable bearing on the ballad of "Chevy Chase," which is preserved there in its oldest known form, will be pointed out in an article presently to appear in Modern Language Notes.
