  By HUMPHREY CORNISH Newcastle. Printed in the present Year This is another of the satires against the Welsh, which were so frequent in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It was written in the latter part of the seventeenth century, as the first edition shows. "The Welch Traveller; or the Unfortunate Welchman; "If any Gentleman do want a Man, As I doubt not but some do now and than, I have a Welchman though but meanly clad— Will make him merry be he nere so sad: If that you read, read it quite ore I pray, And you'l not think your penny cast away. "By Humphry Crouch. "London printed for William Whitwood at the Sign of the The engraving to that edition is exactly similar to the Chap-book frontispiece. As the frontispiece to the Aldermary edition (from which the subjoined illustrations are taken) is almost similar to "The Life and Death of Sheffery Morgan," one from a Newcastle Chap-book of about the same age has been substituted. This is a metrical story of the adventures of a Welshman who was going along star-gazing. "For as hur gaz'd upon the Sky, For want of better wit, Poor Taffy fell immediately Into a great deep pit. "Had not a shepherd been hur friend, And help'd hur quickly out, Hur surely then had had an end, Hur makes no other doubt." Hungry and weary, he arrived at an alehouse, where the hostess gave him rotten eggs, which he cast in her face, and fled. Seeing an apple tree, he climbed it in order to assuage his hunger. "Up into the tree hur gets, The owner came anon, Made hur almost besides hur wits, A cruel fight began. "He pelted hur with large huge stones And hur did apples cast; The stones did so benumb her pones That down hur come at last." He fled, and lying down under a hedge, saw a couple of lovers, one of whom dropped a gold ring, which he picked up and appropriated. But "Going thro' a town, God wot, Against some ill bred curs, Hur shewed it to a chattering trot Who said the ring was hers." An altercation ensued, and it ended in their going before "Now Taffy had his hearts desire He had her company, But when he did begin to jeer, She in his face did fly." He was released, and finding a house open and the proprietor absent, he entered and began feeding on the bacon smoking up the chimney, sitting astride of it; but fell down, bacon and all, when the owner and his wife were sitting by the fire. The man beat him severely, and he ran away. Joining some gipsies on the road, they agreed to rob the house of its bacon, by letting Taffy down the chimney with a rope. This was done. "They let him down, to work he falls, The bacon strait doth bind, The gipsies up the bacon haul And leave the fool behind." He went to the larder and helped himself to the bread and butter, and by his sooty and begrimed appearance he frightened the maid, who thought he was the devil; and she alarmed her master, who came with a sword, but was appalled by the sight of the pseudo-fiend. He walked away, frightening the children, till the women of the town determined to drive the devil out; and sorely they beat poor Taffy, who took refuge in the church, where he was captured by the sexton, who was not afraid of him, carried before a justice, and condemned to stand for "one long hour or more" in the pillory, where the history leaves him. |
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