Songs from the Novelists: From Elizabeth to Victoria

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26. Hazlitt, comparing this song with a prose passage in the same story, says it is "written in a less sombre style, with a mixture of banter and irony. But it is distinguished by the same fulness of feeling, and the same simple, forcible, and perfect expression of it. There is nothing wanting, and nothing superfluous. The author has produced exactly the impression he intended."

28. "Scott," says Palgrave, "has given us nothing more complete and lovely than this little song, which unites simplicity and dramatic power to a wildwood music of the rarest quality." "Maisie" is "Mary."

32. Scott wrote: "I cannot suppress the pride of saying that these lines have been beautifully set to original music by Mrs. Arkwright of Derbyshire." 62. "From the Spanish."

65. The lines

"Deep in each bosom's secret cell
The hermit-sorrows lie,"

will remind many readers of Keble's

"Each in his hidden sphere of joy or woe,
Our hermit-spirits dwell and range apart."

73. Suggested, of course, by the proverbial lines:

77. The query

Three wise men of Gotham
Went to sea in a bowl."

"Where's the snow

That fell the year that's fled?"

"almost persuades " one that Lover knew the original of

"Nay, but where is the last year's snow?"

So. Lover wrote: "The song was written to illustrate my belief that the most commonplace expression, appropriately applied, may successfully serve the purposes of the lyric; and here experience has proved me right, for this very song of 'What will you do?' (containing in it that other commonplace, 'That's what I'd do') has been received with special favour by the public."

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89. It is interesting to compare with Lever's lines the version which Thackeray has furnished (in Rebecca and Rowena) of the same original :

"The Pope he is a happy man,

His Palace is the Vatican :

And there he sits and drains his can;

The Pope he is a happy man.

I often say when I'm at home,
I'd like to be the Pope of Rome.

"And then there's Sultan Saladin,
That Turkish Soldan full of sin;
He has a hundred wives at least,
By which his pleasure is increased;
I've often wished, I hope no sin,
That I were Sultan Saladin.

"But no, the Pope no wife may choose,
And so I would not wear his shoes;
No wine may drink the proud Paynim,
And so I'd rather not be him;

My wife, my wine, I love, I hope, '

And would be neither Turk nor Pope."

97. The idea embodied in this song is practically identical with that contaшed in the well-known lyric by Hartley Coleridge :

"Her loveliness I never knew

Until she smiled on me."