For most of us, singer and musicologist alike, English song from the death of Purcell to the Victorian ‘renaissance’ nearly two centuries later is represented by a few of the Shakespearean settings of Arne, and a small handful of such perennial favourites as Leveridge's ‘Black-ey'd Susan’, Boyce's ‘Heart of Oak’, Dibdin's ‘Tom Bowling’, and Horn's once-ubiquitous ‘Cherry ripe’. As for our knowledge of the cultural environment in which such pieces naturally have their place, that is generally more limited still. Though theatrical in origin, we may take as typical of the sort of vocal melody which was popular with early Georgian audiences, Arne's charming ‘O come, o come, my dearest’ from The Fall of Phaeton (1736). If we agree, with Ernest Walker, that such a song is, in its way, ‘a sparkling polished little gem’, then it may be fairly maintained that English song during the first half of the eighteenth century is a veritable treasure trove of delightful music—none of it very ‘great’, certainly, but much of it worthy of a better fate than the oblivion to which it has been carelessly consigned.