/ · John S. Farmer’s Canting Songs and Slang Rhymes
Flashey Joe
Flashey Joe
1826
By R. MORLEY in Universal Songster, ii. 194.
I
As Flashey Joe one day did pass
Through London streets, so jolly,
A crying fish, he spied a lass
’Twas Tothill’s pride, sweet Molly!
He wip’d his mug with bird’s-eye blue
1 mouth; silk handkerchief
He cried,—“Come, buss your own dear Joe”;
2 kiss
She turned aside, alas! ’tis true
And bawled out—“Here’s live mackerel, O!
Four a shilling, mackerel, O!
All alive, O!
New mackerel, O.”
II
Says I,—“Miss Moll, don’t tip this gam,
3 talk like that
You knows as how it will not do;
For you I milled flash Dustman Sam
4 fought
Who made your peepers black and blue.
5 eyes
Vhy, then you swore you would be kind
But you have queer’d so much of late,
6 acted strangely
And always changing like the wind,
So now I’ll brush and sell my skate.”
7 be off
Buy my skate, etc.
III
She blubb’d—“Now, Joe, vhy treat me ill?
You know I love you as my life!
When I forsook both Sam and Will,
And promised to become your wife,
You molled it up with Brick-dust Sall
8 took as a mistress
And went to live with her in quod!
9 gaol
So I’ll pike off with my mack’ral
10 walk
And you may bolt with your salt cod.”
Here’s mack’rel, etc.
IV
I could not part with her, d’ye see
So I tells Moll to stop her snivel;
11 crying
“Your panting bubs and glist’ning eye
12 paps
Just make me love you like the divil.”
“Vhy, then,” says she, “come tip’s your dad,
13 shake hands
And let us take a drap of gin,
And may I choke with hard-roed shad
If I forsake my Joe Herring.”
Four a shilling, etc.
Taken from
Musa Pedestris,
Three Centuries of Canting Songs and Slang Rhymes
[1536―1896], collected and annotated by John S. Farmer.
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