Ballads of Romance and Chivalry. Sidgwick Frank

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 preliminaries7:—

      ‘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:—