[In the following excerpt, Day describes the popular appeal of Pills to Purge Melancholy.]

The successive volumes of Wit and Mirth: Or Pills to Purge Melancholy,—D'Urfey's Pills, as they are commonly called,—edited originally (1698-1706) by Henry Playford, and in a final six-volume edition (1719-1720) by Thomas D'Urfey, occupy a unique position in the history of English songs and vocal music. They mark the close of an area of intellectual contempt for popular literature, and the beginning (faintly perceptible in 1720) of an era of antiquarian retrospection and appreciation.

From one point of view they may be regarded as the last of the seventeenth-century drolleries;¹ from another, as the first of the eighteenth-century vocal miscellanies.² Their immediate progenitor was a drollery entitled An Antidote against Melancholy, published by Henry Playford's father, John Playford, in 1661. Their lineal descendants are the collections of songs and ballads edited by antiquaries like Percy and Ritson and by scholars like Child and Rollins.

Playford and D'Urfey, of course, were neither antiquaries nor scholars. They were aware of the difference, later stressed by Child, between folk ballads and street ballads, and between ballads (stories told in song) and theatre songs; but it is clear that they were not interested in the authenticity of their texts, or in popular literature as a phenomenon deserving of critical and philosophical analysis. Their aim was, simply and without self-consciousness, to give the public the songs the public wanted.

In Shakespeare's day, all sorts of songs, both literary and sub-literary, were handed down by oral tradition from generation to generation, hawked about on the streets by professional ballad-singers, and sung in taverns by good fellows who liked to “turn upon the toe” and make merry and drink. Men of letters despised “base balladry,” as Michael Drayton called the songs of the people. Philip Sidney admitted that his heart was moved “more than with a trumpet” by the ancient ballad of Percy and Douglas (Pills, IV, 289), but he felt constrained, at the same time, to apologize for the “Barbarousnes” of his taste. Nevertheless, for every connoisseur of the musically sophisticated madrigals of Byrd, Morley, Dowland, and other Elizabethan composers, there must have been a dozen Philistines of the stamp of Sir Toby Belch, who made the midnight welkin ring with popular love songs and cozier's catches, and who vowed he would drink to his niece as long as there was a passage in his throat and drink in Illyria.

Charles II, three quarters of a century later, was as fond of “slight songs”³ as Sir Toby Belch. The extent of his influence on the musical taste of the nation is difficult to estimate, but it must have been considerable. Certainly he put the weight of his social prestige behind the sort of musical fare that Playford and D'Urfey later served up in their Pills. He was so charmed, for example, by little Molly Davis's singing of “My lodging it is on the cold ground” that he “Rais'd her from her Bed on the Cold Ground to a Bed Royal.”⁴ “I myself,” Addison remarked in 1713, “remember King Charles the Second leaning on Tom D'Urfey's Shoulder more than once, and humming over a Song with him.”⁵

Henry Purcell was the foremost English composer in Charles' time; and yet, despite his immense contemporary reputation, his posthumous Orpheus Britannicus, a two-volume folio of his “Choicest Songs for One, Two, and Three Voices,” could not compete in popularity with Playford's Pills. The first volume of Orpheus Britannicus and the first volume of Pills were published, both by Playford, in the same year (1698), but not more than 500 copies of the former are believed to have been printed as compared with 1500 copies of the latter.⁶ New editions and volumes of Pills, furthermore, were issued at frequent intervals, whereas a second edition of Orpheus Britannicus was not called for until 1706. The public, as usual, preferred “slight songs” to the compositions of a master.

The critics did not share the enthusiasm of the public. Arthur Bedford, an authority on religious music, devoted two chapters of The Great Abuse of Musick (1711) to a denunciation, on moral grounds, of the Pills. John Playford's Musical Companion, he said, had encouraged drunkenness and lechery, and now “Son Henry comes up in his Father's stead, and in Publishing of Profaneness and Debauchery, excells all that went before him. The Volumes sold by him, intitul'd Wit and Mirth, or, Pills to Purge Melancholy, might properly have been call'd Profaneness for Diversion, or, Hot Irons sear the Conscience; and a Poet gives them this character in Front of one of the Volumes, That they will never bring a Man to Repentance, but always have the contrary Effect. In the Preface he informs us, as his Father before him spar'd no Cost nor Pains to oblige the World with Smut and Profaneness; so he would make it his Endeavour to come up to his Example; and indeed he hath done it.”

D'Urfey, the most prolific single contributor to the Pills, knew well enough what the highbrows thought of him, but he does not appear to have been disconcerted; for (as he said) “The Town may da-da-damn me for a Poet, but they si-si-sing my Songs for all that.”⁷ D'Urfey stuttered except when singing or swearing.

Alexander Pope damned him with sardonic praise both in prose and verse. The following letter, written by Pope to Henry Cromwell in 1710, is a masterpiece of irony, but a testimonial, also, to D'Urfey's popularity.

I have not quoted one Latin Author since I came down, but have learn'd without Book a Song of Mr. Thomas Durfey's, who is your only Poet of tolerable Reputation in this Country. He makes all the Merriment in our Entertainment, and but for him, there wou'd be so miserable a Dearth of Catches, that I fear they wou'd (sans ceremonie) put either the Parson or me upon making some for 'em. Any Man, of any Quality, is heartily welcome to the best Toping-Table of our Gentry, who can roundly hum out some Fragments or Rhapsodies of his Works: so that in the same Manner as it was said of Homer, to his Detractors; What? Dares any Man speak against him who has given so many Men to eat? (meaning the Rhapsodists who liv'd by repeating his Verses) So may it be said of Mr. Durfey, to his Detractors; Dares any one despise him, who has made so many Men drink? Alas, Sir! This is a Glory which neither you nor I must ever pretend to. Neither you, with your Ovid, nor I with my Statius, can amuse a whole Board of Justices and extraordinary ‘Squires’ or gain one Hum of Approbation, or Laugh of Admiration! These Things (they wou'd say) are too studious, they may do well enough with such as love Reading, but give us your antient Poet Mr. Durfey.⁸ …

The Beggar's Opera (1728) did much to make such compositions respectable. Gay's purpose, as far as the music of his comedy was concerned, was to ridicule Italian opera. He succeeded, unwittingly, in making people aware of the charm of native English airs, thirty-seven of which in The Beggar's Opera, and over a hundred and thirty in subsequent ballad operas, were from D'Urfey's Pills. Other sources used by authors of ballad operas were broadsides, music sheets, folio song-books, and collections of dance tunes. D'Urfey's Wonders in the Sun (1706), incidentally, is sometimes regarded as the first ballad opera. …

Most of the songs in the Pills, D'Urfey's excepted, are anonymous. The present writer and E. B. Murrie, however, have identified and indexed the authors and composers of a considerable number of them in their bibliography of Restoration song-books.⁹ Ninety-six composers, all told, are represented, and nearly as many old and not-so-old ballad tunes. Henry Purcell set over seventy of the songs in the Pills to music—far more than any other composer. John Eccles, Samuel Ackroyde, John Blow, Richard Leveridge, Jeremiah Clarke, Daniel Purcell, and Thomas Farmer set from twenty to twenty-five each.

Henry Playford and Thomas D'Urfey, the two men who, as we have seen, were responsible for the publication of the Pills, were conspicuous personalities in the life of seventeenth and eighteenth-century London. …

D'Urfey, with his long nose, his bass voice, and his facetious, impudent, vulgar wit, was the indispensable entertainer of the gentry and nobility, for nearly forty years, at their banquets, festivals, and birthday celebrations. Born in Devonshire in 1653, of English and French descent, he sang his songs in the presence of Charles II, James II, William and Mary, Anne, and the Prince of Wales (afterwards George II) and the Princess Caroline of Anspach. Caroline, an emancipated woman, as we know from other evidence, owned several volumes of Pills (now in the British Museum), expensively bound, with red and gilt tooling, and with her coat of arms impressed on the leather covers.

D'Urfey died in 1723, full of years if not of sanctity. In addition to nearly five hundred songs, he wrote thirty-two plays—more than Dryden or any other Restoration dramatist—as well as many prologues, epilogues, narrative poems, and verse satires, none of them memorable for their artistic excellence, but all of them infallibly symptomatic of the literary fashions of the moment. Whether D'Urfey's wealthy patrons laughed at him or with him when he sang them his songs is, perhaps, a moot question; but indisputably they laughed. And to have made three generations of one's fellow countrymen laugh is cause enough for a man's memory to be held in some sort of esteem by posterity.

Notes

1. E.g. Choyce Drollery (1656) and Merry Drollery (1661).

2. E.g. The Vocal Miscellany (1734) and A Complete Collection of Old and New English and Scotch Songs (4 volumes, 1735-1736).

3. Roger North, The Musical Grammarian, ed. Andrews, 1925, p. 27.

4. John Downes, Roscius Anglicanus, 1708, p. 24.

5. The Guardian, no. 67, May 28, 1713.

6. Day and Murrie, The Library, March 1936, pp. 356-401, and March 1937, pp. 427-447.

7. The Fourth and Last Volume of the Works of Mr. Thomas Brown, 1715, p. 117.

8. Miscellanea, I (1727), 29-30.

9. C. L. Day and E. B. Murrie, English Song-Books 1651-1702: A Bibliography with a First-Line Index of Songs (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1940).