CHAPTER I

A proper tenderness for the Peerage will continue to pass current the

illustrious gentleman who was inflamed by Cupid’s darts to espouse the

milkmaid, or dairymaid, under his ballad title of Duke of Dewlap: nor

was it the smallest of the services rendered him by Beau Beamish, that

he clapped the name upon her rustic Grace, the young duchess, the very

first day of her arrival at the Wells. This happy inspiration of a wit

never failing at a pinch has rescued one of our princeliest houses from

the assaults of the vulgar, who are ever too rejoiced to bespatter and

disfigure a brilliant coat-of-arms; insomuch that the ballad, to which

we are indebted for the narrative of the meeting and marriage of the

ducal pair, speaks of Dewlap in good faith--

O the ninth Duke of Dewlap I am, Susie dear!

without a hint of a domino title. So likewise the pictorial historian is

merry over ‘Dewlap alliances’ in his description of the society of that

period. He has read the ballad, but disregarded the memoirs of the beau.

Writers of pretension would seem to have an animus against individuals

of the character of Mr. Beamish. They will treat of the habits and

manners of highwaymen, and quote obscure broadsheets and songs of the

people to colour their story, yet decline to bestow more than a passing

remark upon our domestic kings: because they are not hereditary, we

may suppose. The ballad of ‘The Duke and the Dairymaid,’ ascribed with

questionable authority to the pen of Mr. Beamish himself in a freak

of his gaiety, was once popular enough to provoke the moralist to

animadversions upon an order of composition that ‘tempted every bouncing

country lass to sidle an eye in a blowsy cheek’ in expectation of a

coronet for her pains--and a wet ditch as the result! We may doubt it to

have been such an occasion of mischief. But that mischief may have been

done by it to a nobility-loving people, even to the love of our nobility

among the people, must be granted; and for the particular reason,

that the hero of the ballad behaved so handsomely. We perceive a

susceptibility to adulteration in their worship at the sight of one of

their number, a young maid, suddenly snatched up to the gaping heights

of Luxury and Fashion through sheer good looks. Remembering that they

are accustomed to a totally reverse effect from that possession, it is

very perceptible how a breach in their reverence may come of the change.

Otherwise the ballad is innocent; certainly it is innocent in design.

A fresher national song of a beautiful incident of our country life has

never been written. The sentiments are natural, the imagery is apt and

redolent of the soil, the music of the verse appeals to the dullest ear.

It has no smell of the lamp, nothing foreign and far-fetched about it,

but is just what it pretends to be, the carol of the native bird. A

sample will show, for the ballad is much too long to be given entire:

Sweet Susie she tripped on a shiny May morn,

As blithe as the lark from the green-springing corn,

When, hard by a stile, ‘twas her luck to behold

A wonderful gentleman covered with gold!

There was gold on his breeches and gold on his coat,

His shirt-frill was grand as a fifty-pound note;

The diamonds glittered all up him so bright,

She thought him the Milky Way clothing a Sprite!

‘Fear not, pretty maiden,’ he said with a smile;

‘And, pray, let me help you in crossing the stile.

She bobbed him a curtsey so lovely and smart,

It shot like an arrow and fixed in his heart.

As light as a robin she hopped to the stone,

But fast was her hand in the gentleman’s own;

And guess how she stared, nor her senses could trust,

When this creamy gentleman knelt in the dust!

With a rhapsody upon her beauty, he informs her of his rank, for a

flourish to the proposal of honourable and immediate marriage. He

cannot wait. This is the fatal condition of his love: apparently a

characteristic of amorous dukes. We read them in the signs extended

to us. The minds of these august and solitary men have not yet been

sounded; they are too distant. Standing upon their lofty pinnacles, they

are as legible to the rabble below as a line of cuneiform writing in

a page of old copybook roundhand. By their deeds we know them, as

heathendom knows of its gods; and it is repeatedly on record that the

moment they have taken fire they must wed, though the lady’s finger

be circled with nothing closer fitting than a ring of the bed-curtain.

Vainly, as becomes a candid country lass, blue-eyed Susan tells him that

she is but a poor dairymaid. He has been a student of women at Courts,

in which furnace the sex becomes a transparency, so he recounts to her

the catalogue of material advantages he has to offer. Finally, after

his assurances that she is to be married by the parson, really by the

parson, and a real parson--

Sweet Susie is off for her parents’ consent,

And long must the old folk debate what it meant.

She left them the eve of that happy May morn,

To shine like the blossom that hangs from the thorn!

Apart from its historical value, the ballad is an example to poets

of our day, who fly to mythological Greece, or a fanciful and morbid

mediaevalism, or--save the mark!--abstract ideas, for themes of song,

of what may be done to make our English life poetically interesting, if

they would but pluck the treasures presented them by the wayside;

and Nature being now as then the passport to popularity, they have

themselves to thank for their little hold on the heart of the people. A

living native duke is worth fifty Phoebus Apollos to Englishmen, and

a buxom young lass of the fields mounting from a pair of pails to the

estate of duchess, a more romantic object than troops of your visionary

Yseults and Guineveres.