The Last Gleeman - Page 2

comer, and when a crowd had gathered would
begin in some such fashion as follows (I copy the record of one who
knew him)--"Gather round me, boys, gather round me. Boys, am I standin'
in puddle? am I standin' in wet?" Thereon several boys would cry, "Ali,
no! yez not! yer in a nice dry place. Go on with St. Mary; go on with
Moses"--each calling for his favourite tale. Then Moran, with a
suspicious wriggle of his body and a clutch at his rags, would burst
out with "All me buzzim friends are turned backbiters"; and after a
final "If yez don't drop your coddin' and diversion I'll lave some of
yez a case," by way of warning to the boys, begin his recitation, or
perhaps still delay, to ask, "Is there a crowd round me now? Any
blackguard heretic around me?" The best-known of his religious tales
was St. Mary of Egypt, a long poem of exceeding solemnity, condensed
from the much longer work of a certain Bishop Coyle. It told how a fast
woman of Egypt, Mary by name, followed pilgrims to Jerusalem for no
good purpose, and then, turning penitent on finding herself withheld
from entering the Temple by supernatural interference, fled to the
desert and spent the remainder of her life in solitary penance. When at
last she was at the point of death, God sent Bishop Zozimus to hear her
confession, give her the last sacrament, and with the help of a lion,
whom He sent also, dig her grave. The poem has the intolerable cadence
of the eighteenth century, but was so popular and so often called for
that Moran was soon nicknamed Zozimus, and by that name is he
remembered. He had also a poem of his own called Moses, which went a
little nearer poetry without going very near. But he could ill brook
solemnity, and before long parodied his own verses in the following
ragamuffin fashion:

In Egypt's land, contagious to the Nile,
King Pharaoh's daughter went to bathe in style.
She tuk her dip, then walked unto the land,
To dry her royal pelt she ran along the strand.
A bulrush tripped her, whereupon she saw
A smiling babby in a wad o' straw.
She tuk it up, and said with accents mild,
"'Tare-and-agers, girls, which av yez owns the child?"

His humorous rhymes were, however, more often quips and cranks at the
expense of his contemporaries. It was his delight, for instance, to
remind a certain shoemaker, noted alike for display of wealth and for
personal uncleanness, of his inconsiderable origin in a song of which
but the first stanza has come down to us:

At the dirty end of Dirty Lane,
Liv'd a dirty cobbler, Dick Maclane;
His wife was in the old king's reign
A stout brave orange-woman.
On Essex Bridge she strained her throat,
And six-a-penny was