110 THE COMPLETE ANGLER. 



heard to proceed from the mouth of the most pertinacious schis- 

 matic : and sometimes all the beggars, whose number was neither 

 more nor less than the poets' nine muses, talked all together about 

 this ripping and unripping, and so loud that not one heard what 

 the other said : but at last one beggar craved audience, and told 

 them, that old father Clause, whom Ben Jonson in his Beggar's- 

 bush created king of their corporation,* was that night to lodge 

 at an ale-house, called Catch-her-by-the-way, not far from Wal- 

 tham-cross, and in the high road towards London ; and he there- 

 fore desired them to spend no more time about that and such like 

 questions, but to refer all to father Clause at night, for he was an 

 upright judge ; and in the meantime draw cuts what song should 

 be next sung, and who should sing it. They all agreed to the 

 motion, and the lot fell to her, that was the youngest, and veriest 

 virgin of the company ; and she sung Frank Davison's song,t 

 which he made forty years ago, and all the others of the company 

 joined to sing the burden with her. The ditty was this, but first 

 the burden : 



Bright shines the sun ; play, beggars, play. 



Here's scraps enough to serve to-day. 



What noise of viols is so sweet 



As when our merry clappers ring 7 

 What mirth doth want when beggars meet 7 



A beggar's life is for a king : 



* " The Beggar's-bush " was written by John Fletcher, not Ben Jonson. 

 It sometimes has a first title, " The Royal Merchant," but my copy has 

 only " The Beggar's-bush," under which it was licensed in 162-2. The 

 scene is laid in Flanders, and the king's election occurs Act. ii., Sc. I. — 



Am. Ed. 



t Francis Davison was the eldest sun of Secretary Davison, the victim 

 of the mean and cowardly artifice of Elizabeth to remove from herself the 

 odium of the murder of Mary, Queen of Scots. He was born about 1.575, 

 and intended for the bar, but abandoned it for poesy. The song occurs in 

 a miscellany called The Poetical Rhapsody, 1G02 ; but there are reasons 

 for believing that it was written, not by Davison, but by a poet, whose 

 initials were " A. W." One or two facts, lunvever, tend to identify Davi- 

 son with A. W., and the question is investigated in the reprint of the 

 Rliapsody, 182G, vol. i., cxxv. Between the second edition of the An- 

 gler, 10.55, in which the song first appears, and the third edition of the 

 Rhapsody in IGll, forty-four years had elapsed, so that Walton probably 

 refers to that edition. — Sir Harris JVicholas. 



