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'The hungry sheep, as some one says somewhere, 'look up and are not fed; and the same poet well describes your pipings as being on wretched straw pipes that are 'scrannel' a good word. Oh, for one man who should write healthy, hearty, straightforward English! Oh, for Cobbett!
They are sped; And when they list, their lean and flashy songs Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw; The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, But, swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw, Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread; Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw Daily devours apace, and nothing said." Let us think over this passage, and examine its words.
A second appeared, and struck in: "You are so big, you keep the sun from us. We can't see for you, and we're so cold." Thereupon arose, on all sides, the most terrific uproar of laughter, from voices like those of children in volume, but scrannel and harsh as those of decrepit age, though, unfortunately, without its weakness.
Surely the peacock, with its incomparable parade of glorious colour and the scrannel voice of it issuing forth, as in mockery, from its painted throat, must, like my landlady's butterflies at Great Missenden, have been invented by some skilful fabulist for the consolation and support of homely virtue: or rather, perhaps, by a fabulist not quite so skilful, who made points for the moment without having a studious enough eye to the complete effect; for I thought these melting greens and blues so beautiful that afternoon, that I would have given them my vote just then before the sweetest pipe in all the spring woods.
"Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold A sheep-hook, or have learned aught else, the least That to the faithful herdsman's art belongs! But when they list their lean and flashy songs, Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw; The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed! But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw, Rot inwardly and foul contagion spread."
But there was one mercy in it: the words and the music went together in a perfect concord of weak worthlessness; and Hester had not to listen, with the miserable feeling that rude hands were pulling at the modest garments of her soul, to a true poem set to the music of a scrannel pipe of wretched straw, whose every tone and phrase choked the divine bird caged in the verse.
"Unlike to human sounds it came; Unmixed, unmelodized with breath; But grinding through some scrannel frame, Creaked from the bony lungs of Death."
"Unlike to human sounds it came; Unmixed, unmelodized with breath; But grinding through some scrannel frame, Creaked from the bony lungs of Death."
In The Lady Mother we find the same ornaments spread out before us, many of them very tawdry at their best. Glapthorne's editor has striven to show that the weak-kneed playwright was a fellow-pupil of John Milton's at St. Paul's. One cannot think of the two names together without calling to mind the "lean and flashy songs" and "scrannel pipes of wretched straw" in Lycidas.
It was light employment, and he had plenty of spare time on his hands, which he spent in birdnesting, making whistles out of reeds and scrannel straws, and erecting Lilliputian mills in the little water-streams that ran into the Dewley bog. But his favourite amusement at this early age was erecting clay engines in conjunction with his chosen playmate, Bill Thirlwall.
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