+The Text+ is given from Joshua Sylvester's _A Garland of Christmas
Carols_, where it is printed from an old Birmingham broadside.
+The Story+ is one which naturally attracted the attention of the
popular ballad-maker, and parallel ballads exist in fairly wide European
distribution.
Like the _Carnal and the Crane_, the form in which this ballad is now
known is no witness of its antiquity. A 'ballet of the Ryche man and
poor Lazarus' was licensed to be printed in 1558; 'a ballett, Dyves and
Lazarus,' in 1570-1.
In Fletcher's _Monsieur Thomas_ (1639), a fiddler says he can sing the
merry ballad of _Diverus and Lazarus_. A correspondent in _Notes and
Queries_ (ser. IV. iii. 76) says he had heard only Diverus, never Dives,
and contributes from memory a version as sung by carol-singers at
Christmas in Worcestershire, in which the parallelism of the stanzas is
pushed so far that, in the lines corresponding to 13.3 and 13.4 in the
present version, we have the delightfully popular idea--
'There is a place prepared in hell,
For to sit upon a serpent's knee.'
Husk (_Songs of the Nativity_) also gives this version, from an
eighteenth-century Worcestershire broadside. I have no doubt but that
this feature is traditional from the unknown sixteenth-century ballad.