WIST Quotations

Gay, John -- Fables, Part 2, Fable 16 “The Ravens, the Sexton, and the Earthworm” (1727)

Dave — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 16:48:07 +0000

The prince who kept the world in awe,
The judge whose dictate fix’d the law;
The rich, the poor, the great, the small,
Are levell’d; Death confounds ’em all.

John Gay (1685-1732) English poet and playwright
Fables, Part 2, Fable 16 “The Ravens, the Sexton, and the Earthworm” (1727)
(Source)

Colman, Walter -- “La Danse Machabre or Death’s Duell,” st. 262 (c. 1633)

Dave — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 16:58:43 +0000

The Lord, the Slave, the Peasant, and the King
Unlike in life, in death the self-same thing.

[Mors dominos servis et sceptra ligonibus æquat,
Dissimiles simili conditione trahens.]

Walter Colman (1600-1645) English Franciscan friar
“La Danse Machabre or Death’s Duell,” st. 262 (c. 1633)
(Source)

In Hoyt's New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations (1922), this is translated:

Death levels master and slave, the sceptre and the law,
and makes the unlike like.

Heywood, John -- Ballad (1576), “Be Merry Friends,” st. 17

Dave — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 19:46:29 +0000

Let the world slide, let the world go:
A fig for care, and a fig for woe!
If I can’t pay, why, I can owe;
And death makes equal the high and low.
Be merry, friends!

John Heywood (1497?-1580?) English playwright and epigrammist
Ballad (1576), “Be Merry Friends,” st. 17
(Source)

Collected in John Payne Collier (ed.), A Book of Roxburghe Ballads (1847), which includes more history about it.

This quote from the final stanza of the ballad (as reconstructed) was popularized when quoted in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 5th Ed. (1870) and subsequent editions.

The ballad also shows up in a collection of James Orchard Halliwell (ed.), The Moral Play of Wit and Science (1848) for the Shakespeare Society. This has an earlier version of the ballad, which does not include this stanza. (It also wavers in spelling between "mery" / "merye" and "frends" / "freendes.") This is in turn endnoted with five contemporary English stanzas, replacing the last two given, which includes that quoted above.

"Let the world slide" is used by the Beggar (Sly) in Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, Induction, sc. 1 (c. 1590).