Mary's dream, together with Just like love--Sally Roy--Henry and Emma

“Mary’s Dream” is described in another broadside of the same title, Mary’s Dream.

Percy Clinton Sydney Smythe, sixth Viscount Strangford (1780-1855), earned a degree at Trinity College in Dublin in 1800. He was sent to Lisbon as secretary of legation in 1802 and became interested in Portuguese poetry, particularly that of Luís de Camões. “Just Like Love” is his translation of one of Camões’s poems and was set to music by John Davy (1763-1824) (Wolfe, Secular Music #2304-11; Roud). The text appeared in thirty-five songsters between 1805 and 1820 (R. Keller, Early American Songsters). The song was interpolated into William Dimond’s Hunter of the Alps (1804) and the text was printed in two newspapers: the Philadelphia Repository on April 7, 1804, noted, interestingly, as having been “translated from the Greek,” and the Harrisburg (PA) Oracle of Dauphin on June 30, 1804.

“Sally Roy” is credited to Scotsman John Rannie (active 1789-1806) in the Universal Songster and was set to music by William Shield. Rannie was a working-class poet “without education, and bred to a mechanical employment” (A. D. Harvey 252). It is a rather maudlin song of an intensely romantic nature and circulated in the nineteenth century in songsters, chapbooks, and on broadsides (Universal Songster 1:146-47; Wolfe, Secular Music #8149-54; Roud). The text appeared in twenty-nine songsters between 1807 and 1819 (R. Keller, Early American Songsters).

“Henry and Emma,” with the same basic sentiment as “Sally Roy,” is even more romantic, with Henry’s death at the end being closer to later nineteenth-century songs. The lovers, Henry and Emma, were the subjects of a poem called “The Nut Brown Maid” by Matthew Prior (1664-1721), which was made into a musical piece in 1749 by Thomas Arne. John Opie (1761-1807) painted a portrait of the two that was engraved by Bartolozzi and circulated widely. Between 1774 and 1782 an interlude based on the Henry and Emma theme by Henry Bate was staged at several London theaters. This poem reflects the penultimate scene of the same theme. The source for this text, and in fact, for all the lyrics on this broadside, may be Thomas Wild’s Budget of Mirth (1807), published by Snelling and Simons, whose office was on Devonshire Street, just a few blocks from Coverly’s shop on Milk Street. The typesetting of this song follows Wild’s copy exactly. Wild himself may be the author as the note, “an original song,” follows the title. Most of the other songs in this collection have notes giving location of the music or theatrical performance information.