Agnes' Eve the milkmaid lets the twelve sage-leaves fall from her
casement-window and, like Keats's Madeline, peers through "the honey'd
middle of the night "for a glimpse of the Porphyro to whom she must
pledge her troth.
1. Some years before Thoresby's letter was written, another Yorkshireman,
Francis Brokesby, rector of Rowley in the East Riding, communicated with
Ray about dialect words in use in his district. See Ray's Collection of
English Words, second edition, pp. 170-73 (1691).
2. It has been republished by the late Professor Skeat in the English
Dialect Society's volume, Nine Specimens of English Dialects.
3. Two editions of this ballad-opera were published in 1736. The title of
the first (? pirated) edition runs as follows: A Wonder; or, An Honest
Yorkshire-man. A Ballad Opera; As it is Performed at the Theatres with
Universal Applause. In the second edition the words, "A Wonder,"
disappear from the title.
4. Edited by J. O. Halliwell in his Yorkshire Anthology, 1851.
5. The first edition of Ben Preston's poems appeared in 1860 with the
title, Poems and Songs in the Dialect of Bradford Dale.
6. A. Holroyd: A Collection of Yorkshire Ballads, ed. by C. F. Forshaw.
(G. Bell, 1892.)
7. The reader will find a reprint of the West Riding version of The Peace
Egg, with an attempt by the editor of this anthology to throw light upon
its inner meaning, in the second volume of Essays and Studies of the
English Association (Clarendon Press, 1911).
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