ity, even as to sing them in church would be to sin
against congruity.

There was one carol, however, which I was fain to set alongside of 'The
Seven Virgins,' and omitted only through a scruple in tampering with two
or three stanzas, necessary to the sense, but in all discoverable versions
so barbarously uncouth as to be quite inadmissible. And yet 'The Holy
Well' is one of the loveliest carols in the language, and I cannot give up
hope of including it some day: for the peccant verses as they stand are
quite evidently corrupt, and if their originals could be found I have no
doubt that the result would be flawless beauty. Can any of my readers
help to restore them?

'The Holy Well,' according to Mr. Bramley, is traditional in Derbyshire.
'Joshua Sylvester,' in _A Garland of Christmas Carols_, published in 1861,
took his version from an eighteenth-century broadsheet printed at
Gravesend, and in broadsheet form it seems to have been fairly common.
I choose the version given by Mr. A. H. Bullen in his _Carols and Poems_,
published by Nimmo in 1886:--

"As it fell out one May morning,
And upon one bright holiday,
Sweet Jesus asked of His dear mother
If He might go to play.

"To play, to play, sweet Jesus shall go,
And to play pray get you gone;
And let me hear of no complaint
At night when you come home.

"Sweet Jesus went down to yonder town,
As far as the Holy Well,
And there did see as fine children,
As any tongue can tell.

"He said, God bless you every one,
And your bodies Christ save and see:
Little children shall I play with you,
And you shall play with Me?"

So far we have plain sailing; but now, with the children's answer, comes
the trouble:--

"But they made answer to Him, No:
They were lords' and ladies sons;
And He, the meanest of them all,
Was but a maiden's child, born in an ox's stall.

"Sweet Jesus turn'd Him around,
And He neither laughed nor smiled,
But the tears came trickling from His eyes
Like water from the skies."

A glance, as I contend, shows these lines to be corrupt: they were not
written, that is to say, in the above form, which violates metre and
rhyme-arrangement, and is both uncouth and redundant. The carol now picks
up its pace again and proceeds--

"Sweet Jesus turned Him round about,
To His mother's dear