you going up so high?
To sweep the cobwebs off the sky,
But I'll be with you by-and-by."

* * * * *

"Old Mother Bunch, shall we visit the moon?
Come, mount on your broom, I'll stride on the spoon;
Then hey to go, we shall be there soon!"

This rhyme was sung at the time in derision to Earl Grey's and Lord
Brougham's aerial, vapoury projects of setting the Church's house in
order.

"Lord Grey," said the satire-monger, "provided the cupboards and larders
for himself and relatives. He was a paradoxical 'old woman' who could
never keep quiet."

"There was an old woman, and what do you think,
She lived upon nothing but victuals and drink;
Victuals and drink were the chief of her diet,
And yet this old woman could never keep quiet."

As a prototype of reform this old woman was further caricatured as
Madame Reform.

The going "up in a basket ninety-nine times as high as the moon"
referred to Lord Grey's command to the English bishops to speedily set
their house in order. The ascent was flighty enough, "ninety-nine times
as high as the moon, to sweep the cobwebs off the sky"--in other words,
to set the Church, our cathedrals and bishops' palaces in order--and
augured well; but this old woman journeyed not alone, in her hand she
carried a broom (Brougham). It may have been a case of ultra-lunacy this
journey of ninety-nine times as high as the moon, and "one cannot help
thinking," said a writer of that period, "of the song, 'Long life to the
Moon'; but this saying became common, 'If that time goes the coach, pray
what time goes the basket?'"

The "Robbin, a bobbin, the big-bellied Ben" parody alluded to Dan
O'Connell; the butcher and a half to the Northamptonshire man and his
driver; eating "church" and "steeple" meant Church cess.

O'Connell certainly did cut the Church measure about. In his curtailment
he would not leave a room or a church for Irish Protestants to pray in.

"Little dog" refers to Lyttleton in the nursery rhyme, for when the
under-trafficing came to light, Lord Grey, it is said, was so bewildered
at his position that he doubted his own identity, and exclaimed--

"If I be I, as I suppose I be,
Well, I've a 'Little dog,' and he'll know me!"

FINIS

Transcriber's Endnote:

The following amendments have been made to the original text:

P. 96. _But the stick would not._ has been added as line 6 of the