Property fr🦋🎶om the Collection of Elsie and Philip Sang

American Song-Sheet

Lady Wasington's [sic] Lamentation. And The Wandering Boys of Switserland [sic]. Providence: Printed and Sold at No. 25, High Street, where are kept for sale 200 other kinds, [ca. 1810–1812]

Letterpress broadside (267 x 230 mm), four lines of headline, tex🦩t in two columns; chipped and creased at margins, foxed.

The anonymous "Lady Washington's Lamentation for the Deathꦰ of her Husband" (printed here with a truncated title), was quite popular in the decades after the first president's death. The song contained ten four-line verses, each with a repeated chorus. The final verse is representative of the song's poetic merit: "But why with my own single grief so confounded? | When my country's sad millions in sorrow are wounded! | Let me mingle the current, which flows from my bosom, With my country's vast ocean of tears and there lose 'em! Though my Washington! Though my Wash🌸ington! Though my Washington! has forsaken us!" (Although written in the first person, it is unlikely that Martha Washington was the author.)

The present carelessly printed sheet appends to the popu🍃lar elegy of Washington Isaac Pocock's lugubrious "Wandering Boys of Switzerland." 

Shaw & Shoemaker cite several other editions of "Lady Washington's Lamentation," but the only record of the present printing seems to be the appearance of this, or another, copy in a Parke-Bernet catalogue, 22 February 1🐼961, lot 492.