Biog. Hist. of Gonville and Caius, ed. John Venn, I, 69); and in all probability he was the "T. Richeson" whose name is signed to a ballad "To the toune of "The raire & greatest gift,"[1] preserved in B. M. MS. Cotton. Vesp. A. XXV (ed. Boeddeker, Jahrbuch für romanische und englische Sprache, N. F., II, 362) . His "proper new Song" was not licensed, and the tune is not mentioned by Chappell; but this ballad was not in the first edition of the Handfull.
This begins "Attend thee, go play thee, / Sweet loue I am busie;" and in the Gorgious Gallery, 1578 (Collier's reprint, p. 49), there is a ballad written hi imitation of it, "The Louer exhorteth his Lady to bee constant, to the Tune of Attend thee go play thee." In the Marriage of Wit and Wisdom, 1579 (Shakespeare Society ed., p. 20), Wantonness sings a song "to the tune of 'Attend the goe playe the.'" It is only reasonable, then, to suppose that No. 4 was in the first edition of the Handfull. It is odd that Collier nowhere mentioned the appearance of the first five stanzas (with many verbal dissimilarities) of this ballad in his much quoted "MS. of the reign of James I" (cf. No. 15, below).
This is in the same measure, and was probably written by the same person, as No. 4, which without doubt it immediately followed. Peter Picks is undoubtedly a pseudonym.
This is a reply to a ballad which began,
Where is the life that late I led?
Where are those [happy days]?
(cf. Taming of the Shrew, IV, i, 143; 2 Henry IV, V, iii, 147; Anders, Shakespeare's Books, p. 181), and which was registered by Richard Jones, the publisher of the 1566 Sonnets and the 1584 Handfull, about March, 1566 (Trans., I, 308), as "A newe ballet of one who
- ↑ "The reare and grettyst gyfte of all" is the first line of a ballad on King Solomon (very probably that registered by Walker on March 4, 1559-60, Trans., I, 127), which is preserved in MS. Ashmole 48 (ed. Wright, p. 44).
