nd hum, and when music failed him
he fell back on quotations. As he was subject to extremes
of depression and elevation it was nothing unusual for him
to commence a Saturday evening in tears and finish up with
singing 'about Jack's delight being his lovely Nan' towards
the end of it. Here we gather that one of his favourite songs
was C. Dibdin's 'Lovely Nan,' containing these two lines:

But oh, much sweeter than all these
Is Jack's delight, his lovely Nan.

His musical powers made him useful at the club-room in the
King's Bench, where David discovered him leading the chorus of
'Gee up, Dobbin.' This would be 'Mr. Doggett's Comicall Song'
in the farce _The Stage Coach_, containing the lines--

With a hey gee up, gee up, hay ho;
With a hay gee, Dobbin, hey ho!

'Auld Lang Syne' was another of Mr. Micawber's favourites,
and when David joined the worthy pair in their lodgings at
Canterbury they sang it with much energy. To use Micawber's
words--

When we came to 'Here's a hand, my trusty frere' we
all joined hands round the table; and when we declared
we would 'take a right gude willie waught,' and hadn't
the least idea what it meant, we were really affected.

The memory of this joyous evening recurred to Mr. M. at a later
date, after the feast in David's rooms, and he calls to mind
how they had sung

We twa had run about the braes
And pu'd the gowans fine.

He confesses his ignorance as to what gowans are,

but I have no doubt that Copperfield and myself would
frequently have taken a pull at them, if it had been
feasible.

In the last letter he writes he makes a further quotation from
the song. On another occasion, however, under the stress of
adverse circumstances he finds consolation in a verse from
'Scots, wha hae',' while at the end of the long epistle in
which he disclosed the infamy of Uriah Heep, he claims to
have it said of him, 'as of a gallant and eminent naval Hero,'
that what he has done, he did

For England, home, and beauty.

'The Death of Nelson,' from which this line comes, had a
long run of popularity. Braham, the composer, was one of the
leading tenors of the day, and thus had the advantage of being
able to introduce his own songs to the public. The novelist's
dictum that 'composers can very seldom sing their own music or
anybody else's either' (_P.P._ 15) may be true in the main, but
scarcely applies to Braham, who holds very h