In the scarce copy of "Æsop Smith" now before me, I find a few manuscript notes of mine perhaps worth transcribing. One has it, "This book is actually autobiographical; but (as Rabelais did) I often mix up irrelevant and extraneous matter by way of gilding pills, &c., and that &c. is like one of Coke's upon Littleton, full of hints to be amplified." Further, "Let readers remember that this book was written and published long before recent changes in our laws of marriage and divorce and libel: also when no Englishman dared to go bearded, and no civilian was permitted to be armed. In advocacy of all these things and many more, then unheard of but now common, I was in advance of the age; and in some degree my private notions conduced to very wholesome public changes." Again: "When Rabelais is diffuse, or a buffoon, or worse, it may be to throw disputers off the scent as to his real mark of satire or philosophy. Perhaps, like Liguori, Æsop has written a book for the sake of a sentence, and veils his true intent in a designed mist of all sorts of miscellaneous matter. I shan't tell you clearly, but you may guess for yourselves." The book includes a hundred and thirty original fables, essayettes, anecdotes, tirades, songs, and musings, all of which thronged my brain as I cantered along, and were set down in black and white as soon as I got home. Stay: some were even pencilled in the saddle,--in especial this, which became very popular afterwards, particularly in the charming musical composition thereof by Mrs. Stafford Bush, and as sung by Mr. Fox at St. James's Hall and elsewhere. It was printed in an earliest edition of my Ballads and Poems (Hall & Virtue), and is headed there, "Written in the saddle on the crown of my hat." I reproduce it here for the sake of that heading, though it occurs also in my extant volume of poems without it:--
"At five on a dewy morning, Before the blaze of day, To be up and off on a high-mettled horse, All care and danger scorning, Over the hills away,-- To drink the rich sweet breath of the gorse, And bathe in the breeze of the downs.-- Ha! man, if you can,--match bliss like this In all the joys of towns!
"With glad and grateful tongue to join The lark at his matin hymn, And thence on faith's own wing to spring And sing with cherubim! To pray from a deep and tender heart With all things praying anew, The birds and the bees and the whispering trees, And heather bedropt with dew.-- To be one with those early worshippers, And pour the carol too!