The fullest source of information on this subject Disraeli found in a manuscript note transcribed from some of Aubrey's papers, which singularly elucidates a phrase which has been the subject of some “perverse ingenuity” among the critics—“Poor Tom, thy horn is dry " “Till the breaking out of the civil wars, Toms of Bedlam, did travel about the country; they had been poor, distracted men, that had been put into Bedlam, where, recovering some soberness, they were licentiated to go a begging, i. e., they had on their left arm an armilla, or iron ring for the arm, about four inches long, as printed in some works; they could not get it off. They wore about their necks a great horn of an ox, in a string or bawdry, which, when they came to a house they did wind; and they put the drink given them into this horn, whereto they put a stopple. Since the wars I do not remember to have seen any one of them.”
The whole description of these Toms o' Bedlam and their counterfeits—“the progging Abram men,” as they are given by Disraeli, from Decker and other old authors—affords a curious illustration of the fidelity of Shakespeare's delinea tion of character, even when most grotesque and apparently unnatural.
The assumed character of Edgar bears the most
exact resemblance to the description of these beings, as it has been dug out of the past by the researches of the literary antiquarian. “The wild ditties of these itinerate lunatics gave rise,” says this author, “to a class of poetry once fashionable among the “wits, composed in the character of a Tom o' Bedlam.” Purcel has set one of them to very fine music. Percy has preserved six of these mad songs, some of which, however, Disraeli pronounces of too modern a date to have seen actual service; but he adds a fine
one from a miscellany published in 1661, and that not the first edition. It concludes with the following stanza of wild imagery:
