276 A Childreiis Gainc and the Lyke IFake.
This lady to the parson said Shall I be so when I am dead ? Oh, yes, dear lady, you are so Whether you are dead or no.
Some versions substitute for the lovely tenth line, " The parson prayed against pride and sin," obviously a puritan touch replacing the reference to the tolling of the bell and the singing of the choir. Another version has : " The parson prayed and clerk did sing," and reminds us of the villages where the clerk had a good note. We can thus trace the history of the ballad from Catholic to Puritan usage. For that it dated back to Catholic times is rendered probable by the wide distri- bution of the ballad, and also by its use in medicine.
4. The versions have come from most parts of England, and from Ireland as far as West Kerry. The reciter in that case was illiterate : an old Irish nurse who could neither read nor write. But she was equally fluent in Irish and English and was a store- house of old ballads and stories. In her rhyme the dead man is on the ground and the lady speaks to the sexton, without apparently entering the church. When the sexton says to the lady, " you will be so when you are dead," the case is almost like that of Hamlet with the grave-digger. This enables us to distinguish two elements in the later ballad : the sight of the dead and the visit to the church. The presence of the dead in the church is not easy to understand. On the other hand, the lady coming across death, is like the forty-fifth figure in Holbein's Imagines Mortis. It looks as if some ' maker ' of the complete ballad had put his materials together rather clumsily from various sources, and that he took the lady to church for the sake of edification — a characteristic ballad touch.
5. An American correspondent says that similar rhymes about the Lyke Wake are current in parts of the United States. He then quotes the lines which he heard as a child in Virginia in the early seventies. I have myself distant relations in Western Virginia and it is quite possible that they also may have continued in the old tradition.
6. In Dorset, so a lady informs me, the rhyme about death
