“London Bridge is broken down,
     Dance over my Lady Lea: 
  London Bridge is broken down,
     With a gay ladee.”

This must surely refer to some event preserved in history,—­may indeed be well known to well-read antiquaries, though so totally unknown to men whose general pursuits (like my own) have lain in other directions.  The present, however, is an age for “popularising” knowledge; and your work has assumed that task as one of its functions.

The difficulties attending such inquiries as arise out of matters so trivial as an old ballad, are curiously illustrated by the answers already printed respecting the “wooing frog.”  In the first place, it was attributed to times within living memory; then shown to exceed that period, and supposed to be very old,—­even as old as the Commonwealth, or, perhaps, as the Reformation.  This is objected to, from “the style and wording of the song being evidently of a much later period than the age of Henry VIII.;” and Buckingham’s “mad” scheme of taking Charles into Spain to woo the infanta is substituted.  This is enforced by the “burden of the song;” whilst another correspondent considers this “chorus” to be an old one, analogous to “Down derry down:”—­that is, M. denies the force of Mr. MAHONY’s explanation altogether!

(Why Mr. Mahony calls a person in his “sixth decade” a “sexagenarian” he best knows.  Such is certainly not the ordinary meaning of the term he uses.  His pun is good, however.)

Then comes the hermit of HOLYPORT, with a very decisive proof that neither in the time of James I., nor of the Commonwealth, could it have originated.  His transcript from Mr. Collier’s Extracts carries it undeniably back to the middle of the reign of Elizabeth.  Of course, it is interesting to find intermediate versions or variations of the ballad, and even the adaptation of its framework to other ballads of recent times, such as “Heigho! says Kemble,”—­one of the Drury Lane “O.P.  Row” ballads (Rejected Addresses, last ed., or Cunningham’s London).  Why the conjecture respecting Henry VIII. is so contemptuously thrown aside as a “fancy,” I do not see.  A fancy is a dogma taken up without proof, and in the teeth of obvious probability,—­tenaciously adhered to, and all investigation eschewed.  This at least is the ordinary signification of the term, in relation to the search after truth.  How far my own conjecture, or the mode of putting it, fulfills these conditions, it is not necessary for me to discuss:  but I hope the usefulness and interest of the “Notes and queries” will not be marred by any discourtesy of one correspondent towards another.