The country lass for me, give me the bonny country lass, take you the girls o'th city, the country girls do them surpass, though London girls are witty: the country girls in honesty, do citizens surpass, then once again I do proclaim, none like the country lass. The tune is, Hey boys up go we.

The country lass for me, give me the bonny country lass, take you the girls o'th city, the country girls do them surpass, though London girls are witty: the country girls in honesty, do citizens surpass, then once again I do proclaim, none like the country lass. The tune is, Hey boys up go we.

Table of contents

The Country Lass for me,

§

[Page]

The Country Lass for me,

Give me the bonny Country Lass,

take you the Girls o'th City,

The Country Girls do them surpass,

though London Girls are witty:

The Country Girls in Honesty,

do Citizens surpass,

Then once again I do proclaim,

none like the Country Lass.

The Tune is, Hey Boys up go we.

[figure]

[figure]

COme Lovers all, both great and small,

and listen to my Ditty,

That often boast, nay cry and yall,

of the Beauties of the City:

Yet in my mind, all men may sind,

as they the Country pass,

That Maidens they, are brisk and gay,

beyond a London Lass.

There s Joan and Margaret, wondrous fair,

and beautiful indeed,

No Citizen can them compare,

they do them all exceed;

For they are lively stirring Girls,

whose, goodness doth surpass,

And now say I none can come nigh,

the brisk young Country Lass.

But let me not most carelesly,

forget poor loving Jenny,

If on her once you cast your eye,

'tis ten to one she'l win ye:

For she is beautiful indeed,

and other Girls surpass,

Come all agree, and say with me,

none's like the Country Lass.

There's pritty Betty amongst the rest,

whose Lips are like a Cherry,

Her vertues cannot be exprest,

besides she's wandrous merry:

She has a lovely rouling eye,

he needs must be an Ass,

That in this point will not comply,

and love the Country Lass,

[figure]

[figure]

THeir Head-cloaths are as white as milk

and neatly they are drest,

Their skin as soft as any silk,

and Lilly-white the Breast:

But mind how prittily they trip,

and jet it o're the Grass,

You'l cry out then, like other men,

give me the Country Lass.

But go unto a Market Town,

brave Lasses you may see,

Though dressed in a home-spun Gown,

yet tite and neat they be:

And like good Huswifes they are drest,

yea, neatly by they pass,

And you may know where e're you go

the honest Country Lass.

Mind but the colour of their Cheeks,

they Roses do exceed,

While London Lasses like to Leeks,

look green and pale indeed:

But you may find them brisk and Kind,

when they sit on the Grass,

They'l kiss and play, up and away,

O bonny Country Lass.

Their Sweet-hearts they do keep in tow[?]

with knitting of the Brow,

And bind them for to keep the Law,

which Cupid doth allow:

These bonny Girls are precious Pearls,

whose goodness doth surpass,

And far exceed, the London breed,

O brave young Country Lass.

The Country Lass betimes doth rise,

and in the ayr she goes,

When mighty Storms doth dim the skies,

in bittter Frosts and Snows:

Through Rain and Hail, with Milking-pail,

she merrily doth pass,

And thinks no harm, be it cold or warm,

brave down-right Country Lass.

Then boast no more, of your great store,

of bonny London Lasses,

Since you may find in every kind,

the Country girls surpasses:

And do indeed, your Comforts breed,

then he is a simple Ass,

His judgement's weak, who once dare speak,

against the Country Lass.

§

§

Printed for P. Brooksby, in West-smithfield.

Information about this book

Title statement

The country lass for me, give me the bonny country lass, take you the girls o'th city, the country girls do them surpass, though London girls are witty: the country girls in honesty, do citizens surpass, then once again I do proclaim, none like the country lass. The tune is, Hey boys up go we.

Edition statement

1680-1685?

Publication

Publisher

Text Creation Partnership,

Place of publication

Ann Arbor, MI ; Oxford (UK) :

Date

2009-10 (EEBO-TCP Phase 1).

ID [DLPS]

B02413

ID [STC]

Wing C6538

ID [STC]

Interim Tract Supplement Guide EBB65H[42]

ID [EEBO-CITATION]

99887066

ID [PROQUEST]

ocm99887066

ID [VID]

181792

Availability

This keyboarded and encoded edition of the work described above is co-owned by the institutions providing financial support to the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership. This Phase I text is available for reuse, according to the terms of Creative Commons 0 1.0 Universal. The text can be copied, modified, distributed and performed, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.

Series

Early English books online.

Notes

(EEBO-TCP ; phase 1, no. B02413)

Transcribed from: (Early English Books Online ; image set 181792)

Images scanned from microfilm: (Early English books; Tract supplement ; A2:3[42])

Source

— The country lass for me, give me the bonny country lass, take you the girls o'th city, the country girls do them surpass, though London girls are witty: the country girls in honesty, do citizens surpass, then once again I do proclaim, none like the country lass. The tune is, Hey boys up go we.,

Extent

1 sheet ([1] p.) : ill. (woodcuts).

Printed for P[hilip]. Brooksby, in West-smithfield.,. [London] :: [between 1680-1685]. (Verse: "Come lovers all, both great and small ...") (Place, date of publication, and publisher's name from Wing.) (Reproduction of original in the Harvard University, Houghton Library.)

Creation

Created by converting TCP files to TEI P5 using tcp2tei.xsl, TEI @ Oxford.

Editorial practices

EEBO-TCP is a partnership between the Universities of Michigan and Oxford and the publisher ProQuest to create accurately transcribed and encoded texts based on the image sets published by ProQuest via their Early English Books Online (EEBO) database (http://eebo.chadwyck.com). The general aim of EEBO-TCP is to encode one copy (usually the first edition) of every monographic English-language title published between 1473 and 1700 available in EEBO.

EEBO-TCP aimed to produce large quantities of textual data within the usual project restraints of time and funding, and therefore chose to create diplomatic transcriptions (as opposed to critical editions) with light-touch, mainly structural encoding based on the Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org).

The EEBO-TCP project was divided into two phases. The 25,363 texts created during Phase 1 of the project have been released into the public domain as of 1 January 2015. Anyone can now take and use these texts for their own purposes, but we respectfully request that due credit and attribution is given to their original source.

Users should be aware of the process of creating the TCP texts, and therefore of any assumptions that can be made about the data.

Text selection was based on the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (NCBEL). If an author (or for an anonymous work, the title) appears in NCBEL, then their works are eligible for inclusion. Selection was intended to range over a wide variety of subject areas, to reflect the true nature of the print record of the period. In general, first editions of a works in English were prioritized, although there are a number of works in other languages, notably Latin and Welsh, included and sometimes a second or later edition of a work was chosen if there was a compelling reason to do so.

Image sets were sent to external keying companies for transcription and basic encoding. Quality assurance was then carried out by editorial teams in Oxford and Michigan. 5% (or 5 pages, whichever is the greater) of each text was proofread for accuracy and those which did not meet QA standards were returned to the keyers to be redone. After proofreading, the encoding was enhanced and/or corrected and characters marked as illegible were corrected where possible up to a limit of 100 instances per text. Any remaining illegibles were encoded as <gap>s. Understanding these processes should make clear that, while the overall quality of TCP data is very good, some errors will remain and some readable characters will be marked as illegible. Users should bear in mind that in all likelihood such instances will never have been looked at by a TCP editor.

The texts were encoded and linked to page images in accordance with level 4 of the TEI in Libraries guidelines.

Copies of the texts have been issued variously as SGML (TCP schema; ASCII text with mnemonic sdata character entities); displayable XML (TCP schema; characters represented either as UTF-8 Unicode or text strings within braces); or lossless XML (TEI P5, characters represented either as UTF-8 Unicode or TEI g elements).

Keying and markup guidelines are available at the Text Creation Partnership web site.