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 near Gargrave, in Craven, and was drowned. In Gargrave church-yard lie the remains of perhaps the actual ‘last of the minstrels.’[8]
IV. Collectors and Editors.
Now a word or two as to the collectors and editors. To take the broadsides first, the largest collections are at Magdalene College, Cambridge (eighteen hundred broadsides collected by Selden and Pepys), in the Bodleian at Oxford, and in the British Museum. The Bodleian contains collections made by Anthony-à-Wood, Douce, and Rawlinson; the British Museum, the great Roxburghe and Bagford collections, which have been reprinted and edited by William Chappell and the Rev. J. W. Ebsworth for the Ballad Society, as well as other smaller volumes of ballads.