Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 | Page 4

printing
press was the mere vehicle of polemics for the educated minority, and
when the daily journal was neither a luxury of the poor, a necessity of
the rich, nor an appreciable power in the formation and guidance of
public opinion, the song and the ballad appealed to the passion, if not to
the intellect of the masses, and instructed them in all the leading events
of the time. In our day the people need no information of the kind, for
they procure it from the more readily available and more copious if not
more reliable, source of the daily and weekly press. The song and
ballad have ceased to deal with public affairs. No new ones of the kind
are made except as miserable parodies and burlesques that may amuse
sober costermongers and half-drunken men about town, who frequent
music saloons at midnight, but which are offensive to every one else.
Such genuine old ballads as remain in the popular memory are either
fast dying out, or relate exclusively to the never-to-be-superseded
topics of love, war, and wine. The people of our day have little heart or
appreciation for song, except in Scotland and Ireland. England and
America are too prosaic and too busy, and the masses, notwithstanding
all their supposed advantages in education, are much too vulgar to
delight in either song or ballad that rises to the dignity of poetry. They
appreciate the buffooneries of the "Negro Minstrelsy," and the inanities
and the vapidities of sentimental love songs, but the elegance of such
writers as Thomas Moore, and the force of such vigorous thinkers and
tender lyrists as Robert Burns, are above their sphere, and are left to
scholars in their closets and ladies in their drawing- rooms. The case
was different among our ancestors in the memorable period of the
struggle for liberty that commenced in the reign of Charles I. The

Puritans had the pulpit on their side, and found it a powerful instrument.
The Cavaliers had the song writers on theirs, and found them equally
effective. And the song and ballad writers of that day were not always
illiterate versifiers. Some of them were the choicest wits and most
accomplished gentlemen of the nation. As they could not reach the ears
of their countrymen by the printed book, the pamphlet, or the
newspaper, nor mount the pulpit and dispute with Puritanism on its
own ground and in its own precincts, they found the song, the ballad,
and the epigram more available among a musical and song-loving
people such as the English then were, and trusted to these to keep up
the spirit of loyalty in the evil days of the royal cause, to teach courage
in adversity, and cheerfulness in all circumstances, and to ridicule the
hypocrites whom they could not shame, and the tyrants whom they
could not overthrow. Though many thousands of these have been
preserved in the King's Pamphlets in the British Museum, and in other
collections which have been freely ransacked for the materials of the
following pages, as many thousands more have undoubtedly perished.
Originally printed as broadsides, and sold for a halfpenny at country
fairs, it used to be the fashion of the peasantry to paste them up in
cupboards, or on the backs of doors, and farmers' wives, as well as
servant girls and farm labourers, who were able to read, would often
paste them on the lids of their trunks, as the best means of preserving
them. This is one reason why so many of them have been lost without
recovery. To Sir W. C. Trevelyan literature is indebted for the
restoration of a few of these waifs and strays, which he found pasted in
an old trunk of the days of Cromwell, and which he carefully detached
and presented to the British Museum. But a sufficient number of these
flying leaves of satire, sentiment, and loyalty have reached our time, to
throw a curious and instructive light upon the feelings of the men who
resisted the progress of the English Revolution; and who made loyalty
to the person of the monarch, even when the monarch was wrong, the
first of the civic virtues. In the superabundance of the materials at
command, as will be seen from the appended list of books and MSS.
which have been consulted and drawn upon to form this collection, the
difficulty was to keep within bounds, and to select only such specimens
as merited a place in a volume necessarily limited, by their celebrity,
their wit, their beauty, their historical interest, or the light they might

happen to throw on the obscure biography of the most remarkable
actors in the scenes which they describe. It would be too much to claim
for these ballads the exalted title of poetry. They are not