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Of these "merry moments" Dibdin recalls that Tragedies, Comedies, and Operas were doomed to suffer all the complicated combinations of "Pray ask that gentleman to sit down," "Take off your hat?" and the like. Seemingly afterwards, at Pantomime time, "Barnwell" was discarded in favour of "Jane Shore," as in "The Theatrical Magazine" we find a writer penning the following:
By this time the sea-power of England had become supreme, Britannia ruled the waves, and a native sea-literature was the result. The sea-songs of Thomas Dibdin and other writers were the first fruits of this newly created literary nationalism.
Still more, these songs are pervaded by a true Mohammedan sensualism; a reckless acquiescence in fate, and an implicit, unquestioning, dog-like devotion to whoever may be lord and master. Dibdin was a man of genius; but no wonder Dibdin was a government pensioner at L200 per annum.
"And to prove it," said the colonel, "Power will sing us a song." Power took his pencil from his pocket, and placing the back of a letter across his shako, commenced inditing his lyric, saying, as he did so, "I'm your man in five minutes. Just fill my glass in the mean time." "That fellow beats Dibdin hollow," whispered the adjutant.
The Ferrar family at Little Gidding were the inventors of 'pasting-printing, as they called their barbarous mode of embellishment; and Charles I. himself, in Laud's presence, called their largest scrap-book 'the Emperor of all books, and 'the incomparablest book this will be, as ever eye beheld. The huge volume made up for Prince Charles out of pictures and scraps of text was joyfully pronounced to be 'the gallantest greatest book in the world. The practice of 'grangerising, or stuffing out an author with prints and pages from other works, was even praised by Dibdin as 'useful and entertaining, though in our own time it is rightly condemned as a malpractice.
We should have Ascham inveighing against the ancients and their idle and blind way of living: 'in our father's time, he says, 'nothing was read but books of feigned chivalry'; but Captain Cox would come forth to meet him, attired as in the tournament at Kenilworth, or in the picture which Dibdin has extracted from Laneham.
This act, however, is not so much to be regarded as a strong evidence of the private opinion of the nautical magnates in question but the chief of them is invariably a landsman as of their deference to the force of public estimation on the subject of the songs. Let it not be thought, from the tenor of our subsequent remarks, that we ourselves are at all prejudiced against Dibdin.
It is very rare, being unknown to the great Dibdin, and was snapped up by me for three guineas out of a London bookseller's catalogue. A Virgil printed by Koburger in the year America was discovered, original binding and clasps, not in Dibdin, for three guineas! Hurrah! It excites my madness so that I must rush straight to Piper's and buy right and left.
Dibdin did more to man the "wooden walls of old England" with brave and effective men than all the press-gangs that ever infested the banks of the Thames. There was one man on board the Casket who, more than all others, aided to keep the crew cheerful and happy. He was the life and soul of the forecastle.
It was in that century that the piano came, but not until it was well advanced, for in an old playbill of Covent Garden Theatre, published in 1767, it was announced that "Miss Brickler will sing a favourite song from Judith, accompanied by Mr. Dibdin on a new instrument called the piano forte."
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