[In the following excerpt, Day lists the publication dates of various editions of Pills to Purge Melancholy, traces the beginning of Durfey's editorial work on the series to a relatively late edition, and describes how the title of this popular collection of songs evolved over the years.]

One of the most entertaining of eighteenth-century poetical miscellanies is the six-volume collection of songs and ballads entitled Wit and Mirth: Or Pills To Purge Melancholy. The first volume of this well-known series was published in 1698 and the last in 1720, and its popularity during the intervening years would be difficult to exaggerate. The Princess Caroline of Anspach owned a set;¹ Addison referred to its success and admired its facetious title;² and Gay drew from it over half the tunes in The Beggar's Opera.³ More recently students of old English music and popular literature have, like Gay, found in the Pills a fruitful source of rare and sometimes elsewhere inaccessible material. Since the time of Chappell and Ebsworth, indeed, the collection has been repeatedly ransacked by literary investigators—though it is remarkable how many interesting facts relative to the contents and bibliography of the various volumes have been overlooked. Thus, in the fifth volume⁴ of the 1714 edition there is a full-length modernisation of The Miller's Tale which does not appear to have been noticed by bibliographers of Chaucer.⁵ Other omissions and misconceptions will be pointed out in the course of the present article.

The first volume of the first edition of Pills was published on Monday, November 21, 1698,⁶ but post-dated 1699. Like all subsequent volumes in the series it is a compact duodecimo of over three-hundred numbered pages and contains the words and generally also the music of some two hundred songs and ballads. Henry Playford assembled, edited, and published the collection, and his initials stand at the end of both the dedication to the “Votary's to Bacchus” and the prefatory verses by “The Stationer on the Book.” The latter, it is perhaps worth noting, are borrowed from An Antidote against Melancholy (1661), where they are signed “N. D.,”⁷ and Playford had already used them himself in Wit and Mirth. An Antidote against Melancholy (1682 and 1684). Both of these collections have been erroneously identified with Wit and Mirth: Or Pills To Purge Melancholy.

Playford's venture seems to have been a success, for he announced a second volume in the term catalogues as early as Easter 1699, and again in Michaelmas Term of the same year.⁸ More than twelve months elapsed, however, before the second volume was finally published on Saturday, July 27, 1700.⁹ Playford again signed the dedication, and Tom Brown and William Pittis contributed verses congratulating him on the success of his first, and the publication of his second, “Book of Pills.”

Two more volumes and a second edition of the first volume came out before Playford retired from the publishing business; but none of them seems to have survived. Volume III was announced in the term catalogues for Michaelmas Term, 1701,¹⁰ promised for the following term, and priced at eighteen-pence instead of at half-a-crown, like the former volumes. It was evidently issued in three instalments, the first on Tuesday, March 3, 1702,¹¹ but the last two not until June 1703,¹² more than a year later. Each instalment cost sixpence, or the three bound together, two shillings.

A second edition of Volume I was published on Wednesday, July 22, 1702,¹³ and a fourth volume was finally published on August 6, 1706.¹⁴ But only the first two of the volumes issued by Playford are extant, and of these the copies in the British Museum are, I suppose, unique.

In 1707 John Young took the collection over and on February 1¹⁵ published a new four-volume edition. Volume I, which is correctly called a third edition, has five new songs, and the order of a few others is altered. Volumes II and III are second editions, the former being identical in contents with Volume II of the 1700 edition. Volume IV seems to have been regarded as a first edition, though it is not so designated, and it may not improbably be, therefore, a reissue of Playford's fourth volume, which was first published only six months before.

From time to time Young republished separate volumes of Pills—for instance, a second edition of Volume IV in 1709 with five new songs, all of which deal with contemporary political events. In 1712 he brought out a third edition of Volumes II and III, and in 1714 a fourth edition of Volume I. Young also added a fifth volume to the series on June 26, 1714.¹⁶ All of these volumes of Young's, it may be remarked, are now excessively rare.

In 1719-1720, after a lapse of five years, Jacob Tonson published a final edition of Pills in six volumes. The songs were drastically re-arranged, and more than two hundred new ones, all written by Thomas D'Urfey, were added. These, together with nearly all the songs by D'Urfey which had already been included in the collection, were carefully brought together in Volumes I and II. Seventeen songs, among them some old and meritorious ones, were omitted—unintentionally, one would like to believe.¹⁷

A good deal of confusion has arisen from the fact that two issues of the 1719-1720 edition can be distinguished. The first issue has the title Songs Compleat, Pleasant and Divertive and consists of but five volumes. Printed by subscription, it was delivered to subscribers on Thursday, March 26, 1719.¹⁸ D'Urfey's name appears on the title-pages of Volumes I and II (in which, as I have pointed out, his songs are assembled), and also, erroneously, on the title-page of Volume III. The running-title throughout is Songs Compleat, Pleasant and Divertive.

The second issue was printed from the same type as the first, and with the following exceptions is identical with it.¹⁹ First, the Songs Compleat, Pleasant and Divertive title-pages were withdrawn and Wit and Mirth: Or Pills To Purge Melancholy title-pages substituted; and second, the running-title in all volumes was changed to Pills to Purge Melancholy.²⁰ Finally, a sixth volume, also called Wit and Mirth: Or Pills To Purge Melancholy, was added in 1720.

The 1719-1720 edition was reprinted in the nineteenth century, and it is through this reprint that the Pills are most generally known. Neither the publisher nor the date is specified, but the set in the New York Public Library is rubber-stamped 1876, and it probably came out shortly before that. A peculiar feature of the reprint is the fact that it is a hybrid. Volumes II and VI, that is to say, are of the Wit and Mirth: Or Pills To Purge Melancholy variety, while Volumes I, III, IV, and V belong to the earlier, or Songs Compleat, Pleasant and Divertive issue. Evidently in making the reprint a broken set, consisting partly of one issue and partly of the other, was used.

Thomas D'Urfey's connection with Pills To Purge Melancholy has been very generally misunderstood. Only too frequently he has been described as the editor or even the author of the whole series, with the unfortunate result that several songs have been fathered upon him which he did not, in fact, produce. Such errors are natural enough, perhaps, for as early as 1705 the anonymous author of Visits from the Shades²¹ imagined the ghost of Thomas Heywood as saying to D'Urfey: “your bad Compositions outbalance your good ones above three to one, without the Addition of your Pills to purge Melancholy.” But though D'Urfey was the most voluminous single contributor to all the volumes from 1698 to 1714, he did not himself edit any of them until 1719.

I have already referred to the verses by Tom Brown and William Pittis congratulating Playford on the publication of his second “Book of Pills,” and there is ample evidence that Playford rather than D'Urfey edited all the volumes from 1698 to 1706. Thus in 1701 Pittis contributed prefatory verses to another song-book of Playford's, The Second Book of the Pleasant Musical Companion, in which he averred that Playford's “last Attempt” (by which, a footnote informs us, he meant Pills To Purge Melancholy) was “well design'd, And gain'd it's wish'd effect on ev'ry Mind.” Again, Apollo's Feast (1703) was “Collected,” according to the title-page, and “Published by the Author of Pills to purge Melancholy.” Now Playford published Apollo's Feast,²² and it follows that he must have been the “Author [or, as we should say, the editor] of Pills to purge Melancholy.”

The volumes themselves corroborate this testimony. In the 1719-1720 edition D'Urfey's hand is for the first time in evidence. His name is on the title-pages of the first three volumes of the first issue, and at the end of the dedication; the first two volumes are made up exclusively of his own compositions;²³ and he speaks of himself in the first person in the titles of a large number of songs and poems.²⁴ In the earlier volumes, from 1698 to 1714, on the contrary, no such signs of editing by D'Urfey appear. His songs in these volumes are numerous enough, but when they are attributed to him the third person is invariably used; and indeed it is quite clear that his editorial connection with the work began and ended with the 1719-1720 edition.

The songs and ballads in the Pills were derived from a wide variety of sources.²⁵ Many of them were theatre-songs which in most cases had probably already been printed as broadsides or on single sheets from engraved copper plates.²⁶ Others were from drolleries like Sportive Wit (1656) and Merry Drollery (1661); from courtesy-books like The New Academy of Complements (1671) and The Compleat Courtier (1683); or from folio song-books like The Banquet of Music (1688-1692) and Thesaurus Musicus (1693-1696).

One work in particular, Wit and Mirth. An Antidote against Melancholy, a drollery published by Henry Playford in 1682 and again in 1684, must be considered the ancestor of Wit and Mirth: Or Pills To Purge Melancholy. The similarity of the two titles, of course, is very striking, especially in view of the fact that Playford was the editor and publisher of both collections. And it is significant that thirty-eight out of seventy-four, or more than half,²⁷ of the songs in the 1684 Antidote were subsequently included in the various volumes of Pills. Only one other work, the fifth volume of Choice Ayres & Songs (1684), furnished such a large proportion of its songs (thirty-three out of fifty-seven) to the Pills.

The origin of the title Pills To Purge Melancholy is an interesting but comparatively unimportant question. The immediate suggestion may have come from An Antidote against Melancholy (1661), either directly or through the medium of Henry Playford's drolleries of 1682 and 1684. The medical figure, to be sure, scarcely needs the explanation of a source, though as a matter of fact Playford's very phrase had already been in common use for more than a hundred years. Sir John Harington, in the prologue to The Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596), speaks of a young gentleman's “hauing taken some three or foure score pills to purge melancholie”; and in A Pleasant Comedie, Called The Two Merry Milke-Maids (1620)²⁸ occur the lines:

O Sir, let not your modestie wrong you,
I wud you had a Pill to purge Melancholy.

In 1628, as Ebsworth notes,²⁹ the figure turns up in Robert Hayman's Quodlibets:³⁰

Though thou maist call my merriments, my folly,
They are my Pills to purge my melancholly,
They would purge thine too, wert not thou Foole-holy.

Notes

1. Now in the British Museum.

2. The Guardian, No. 29, April 14, 1713.

3. Cf. W. E. Schultz, Gay's Beggar's Opera, 1923, 306-41.

4. Pp. 325-43.

5. The modernisation is anonymous and of little merit. It is 713 lines long and has no relation, apparently, to Samuel Cobb's version published in 1712 as The Carpenter of Oxford, Or, The Miller's Tale, From Chaucer.

6. The Post Boy, Nos. 562 and 564.

7. There are verses by “N. D.” in John Playford's Select Ayres & Dialogues, 1669, iii, 41; and the preface to his Choice Songs and Ayres For One Voyce (1673) is signed “N. D.” Furthermore, since Playford published the 1669 edition of An Antidote against Melancholy (cf. A Transcript of the Registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers, ed. Eyre, 1913, ii, 394), it is probable that he also published the 1661 edition. The initials “N. D.,” accordingly, may stand for John Playford.

8. The Term Catalogues, ed. Arber, 1906, iii, 123 and 157.

9. The Post Boy, No. 827.

10. The Term Catalogues, ed. Arber, 1906, iii, 273.

11. The Post Boy, No. 1060.

12. The Term Catalogues, ed. Arber, 1906, iii, 359.

13. The Post Boy, Nos. 1121 and 1122.

14. The Post Man, No. 1654. Cf. also The Diverting Post, February 1706, p. 10, in which Playford advertises that “The 4th and last Dose of Pills, which will make the first Vol. compleat, will be speedily Publish'd.”

15. The Post Man, No. 1732.

16. The Post Boy, No. 2985.

17. The following songs were left out of the 1719-1720 edition: “As it fell on a holiday,” “We be soldiers three,” “Martin said to his man,” “Who liveth so merry in all this land,” and “Willy prithee go to bed” (all five of which are from Ravenscroft's Deuteromelia, 1609); also “Sir John got him an ambling nag,” “I love thee for thy fickleness,” “A young man late that lacked a mate,” “In our yard in frosts and snows,” “Still near bright Celia,” “Whenas King Harry ruled this land,” “In the morning ere 'twas light,” “If Rosamond that was so fair,” “If she that was fair London's pride,” “Spring invites the troops to warring,” “Of a worthy London prentice,” and “A rich old cuff, a carpenter by trade.”

18. The Post Boy, No. 4627.

19. That the second issue, like the first, originally consisted of but five volumes is revealed by a preliminary title-page in the first volume of some sets which contains the words, “In Five Volumes. The Fourth Edition.”

20. As to the priority of the Songs Compleat, Pleasant and Divertive issue, a Grolier Club publication entitled Contributions to English Bibliography, 1905, i, 271, calls attention to a curious bit of evidence: “It is probable that, after a few copies of the first five volumes had been issued, the title and head-lines were changed to read uniformly with that of the sixth volume. That the title ‘Songs Compleat,’ etc., was the earlier of the two issues is shown by the fact that the catch word at the end of the ‘Table’ in each of the five volumes still remained ‘Songs,’ while the running title was changed to read, ‘Pills to Purge Melancholy.’”

21. I, 76-77.

22. Arber (The Term Catalogues, 1906, iii, 337) incorrectly assigns Apollo's Feast to D'Urfey.

23. There is one exception to this statement. “Chloe found Amyntas lying,” 1719, i, 328-29, is by Dryden, and must have been included unintentionally in the first volume. Some six or eight songs by D'Urfey, furthermore, seem to have been overlooked, and are scattered through the last four volumes.

24. For instance, “A Mad Dialogue. Sung in my Play, call'd the Richmond Heiress,” 1719, i, 73; and “The Bonny Milk-Maid. Sung in my Play of Don Quixote,” 1719, i, 237. It would be useless to multiply examples.

25. I am at present engaged upon a study of the Pills in which I hope to go into this matter more thoroughly.

26. Single songs sold for a penny apiece, and were extremely popular. In Mercurius Musicus for May and June 1701, there is an advertisement of the first two volumes of Pills, in which, it is affirmed, “you will find most of the single Songs that has been Cutt on Copper for these Ten Years Past.”

27. This figure does not include the forty-four catches at the end of the volume.

28. Sig. D4^v.

29. An Antidote against Melancholy, ed. Ebsworth, 1876, 165.

30. P. 49.