Sweet William's departure, together with The post captain

The first text, “Sweet William’s Departure,” is described on Black Ey’d Susan. 

A copy of the sheet music for the second text, “The Post Captain,” in Micah Hawkins’s “Collection of Music” explains the origins of this song. It was “sung by Mr. Incledon at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden and in his new Entertainment call’d Variety composed by Mr. [William] Shield. The words by Mr. Rannie” (Wolfe, Secular Music #8130-39). No piece titled Variety at Covent Garden is listed in Ben Ross Schneider’s Index to The London Stage, 1660-1800, so it may date from 1801 or later. The song is neither topical nor timely. A contemporary of Charles Dibdin, William Shield (1748-1829) was a leading composer of songs and dramatic pieces in London, The Poor Soldier (1783) being one of his most popular. Mr. Rannie may be John Rannie, the Aberdeenshire poet/composer who published several collections in the 1790s and early 1800s in Aberdeen, Edinburgh, and London.[1] In this song, the sentiment is national and non-topical, and the naval vocabulary knowledgeable, simply tracing the rise of a promising lad to the top rank. A post captain in the British navy was the equivalent to an American army colonel.

“The Post Captain” was popularized in America by John Hodgkinson, a versatile performer with William Dunlap’s Old American Company, and was printed in England and America well into the nineteenth century, appearing in forty-nine American songsters between 1804 and 1820, sometimes with Dibdin given as the composer (R. Keller, Early American Songsters; Roud).

The first four lines of the third text, a little love song called “The Thorn,” are by Robert Burns, written without tune direction in 1794 as “On Chloris requesting me to give her a spray of a sloe-thorn in full blossom.” The remainder is generally attributed to Charles Dibdin and the music to William Shield. As a song it was exceedingly popular, published in a number of editions in England and America well into the nineteenth century—it appeared in thirty-four songsters between 1804 and 1820 (Wolfe, Secular Music #8186-97; R. Keller; Roud).