SOURCE: Day, Cyrus L. Introduction to Wit and Mirth: Or Pills to Purge Melancholy, edited by Thomas D'Urfey, pp. i-xi. New York: Folklore Library Publishers, 1959.

In the following excerpt, Day describes the popular appeal of Pills to Purge Melancholy.

The successive volumes of Wit and Mirth: Or Pills to Purge Melancholy,—D'Urfey's Pills, as they are commonly called,—edited originally (1698-1706) by Henry Playford, and in a final six-volume edition (1719-1720) by Thomas D'Urfey, occupy a unique position in the history of English songs and vocal music. They mark the close of an area of intellectual contempt for popular literature, and the beginning (faintly perceptible in 1720) of an era of antiquarian retrospection and appreciation.

From one point of view they may be regarded as the last of the seventeenth-century drolleries;¹ from another, as the first of the eighteenth-century vocal miscellanies.² Their immediate progenitor was a drollery entitled An...