Ballads of Romance and Chivalry | Page 9

the degradation of the word 'ballad,' until it signifies either the genuine popular ballad, or a satirical song, or a broadside, or almost any ditty of the day. Of the ballad-mongers, we have mentioned Elderton, Deloney, and Johnson. We might add a hundred others, from Anthony Munday to Martin Parker, and even Tom Durfey, each of whom contributed largely to the vast mushroom-literature that sprang up and flourished vigorously for the next century. Chappell mentions that seven hundred and ninety-six ballads remained at the end of 1560 in the cupboards of the council-chamber of the Stationers' Company for transference to the new wardens of the succeeding year. These, of course, would consist chiefly of broadsides: the narrations of strange events, monstrosities, or 'true tales' of the day.
It is true that many of the genuine popular ballads were rewritten to suit contemporary taste. But the style of the seventeenth century ballads cannot be compared to the noble straightforwardness and simplicity of the ancient ballad. Let us place side by side the first stanza of the _Hunting of the Cheviot_ and the first few verses of _Fair Rosamond_, a very fair specimen of Deloney's work.
The popular ancient ballad wastes no time on preliminaries[7]:--
[Footnote 7: A good notion of the way in which the old ballads plunge _in medias res_ may be obtained by reading the Index of First Lines.]
'The Persé owt off Northombarlonde?And avowe to God mayd he,?That he wold hunte in the mowntayns?Off Chyviat within days thre,?In the magger of doughté Dogles;?And all that ever with him be.'
Now for the milk-and-water:--
'Whenas King Henry rulde this land,?The second of that name,?Besides the queene, he dearly lovde?A faire and comely dame.
Most peerlesse was her beautye founde,?Her favour and her face;?A sweeter creature in this worlde?Could never prince embrace.
Her crisped lockes like threads of golde?Appeard to each man's sight;?Her sparkling eyes, like Orient pearles,?Did cast a heavenly light.'
Ritson's taste actually led him, in comparing the above two first verses, to prefer the latter.
Or again we might contrast _Sir Patrick Spence_--
'The King sits in Dumferling towne?Drinking the blude reid wine:?"O whar will I get a guid sailor,?To sail this ship of mine?"'
with the _Children in the Wood_:--
'Now ponder well, you parents deare,?These wordes, which I shall write;?A doleful story you shall heare,?In time brought forth to light.'
Artificial, tedious, didactic. The author of the ancient ballad seldom points, and never draws, a moral, and has unbounded faith in the credulity of the audience. The seventeenth century balladists pitchforked Nature into the midden.
These compositions were printed as soon as written, or, to be exact, they were written for the press. We now class them as broadsides, that is, ballads printed on one side of the paper. The difference between these and the true ballad is the difference between art and nature. The broadside ballad was a form of art, and a low form of art. They were written by hacks for the press, sold in the streets, and pasted on the walls of houses or rooms: Jamieson had a copy of _Young Beichan_ which he picked off a wall in Piccadilly. They were generally ornamented with crude woodcuts, remarkable for their artistic shortcomings and infidelity to nature. Dr. Johnson's well-known lines--though in fact a caricature of Percy's _Hermit of Warkworth_--ingeniously parody their style:--
'As with my hat upon my head,?I walk'd along the Strand,?I there did meet another man,?With his hat in his hand.'
Broadside ballads, including a few of the genuine ancient ballads, still enjoy a certain popularity. The once-famous Catnach Press still survives in Seven Dials, and Mr. Such, of Union Street in the Borough, still maintains what is probably the largest stock of broadsides now in existence, including _Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight_ (or _May Colvin_), perhaps the most widely dispersed ballad of any.
Minstrels of all sorts were by this time nearly extinct, in person if not in name; their successors were the vendors of broadsides. Nevertheless, survivors of the genuine itinerant reciters of ballads have been discovered at intervals almost to the present day. Sir Walter Scott mentions a person who 'acquired the name of Roswal and Lillian, from singing that romance about the streets of Edinburgh' in 1770 or thereabouts. He further alludes to 'John Graeme, of Sowport in Cumberland, commonly called the Long Quaker, very lately alive.' Ritson mentions a minstrel of Derbyshire, and another from Gloucester, who chanted the ballad of _Lord Thomas and Fair Eleanor_. In 1845 J. H. Dixon wrote of several men he had met, chiefly Yorkshire dalesmen, not vagrants, but with a local habitation, who at Christmas-tide would sing the old ballads. One of these was Francis King, known then throughout the western dales of Yorkshire, and still remembered, as 'the Skipton Minstrel.' After a merry Christmas meeting, in the year 1844, he walked into the river