It must be borne in mind that I have all along spoken—except when the description is necessarily general—of the street, or itinerant, minstrel of old. The highest professors of the art were poets and composers, men often of genius, learning, and gravity, and were no more to be ranked with the mass of those I have been describing than is Alfred Tennyson with any Smithfield scribbler and bawler of some Newgate “Copy of Verses.”
How long “Sir Topas” and the other “old stories” continued to be sung in the streets there are no means of ascertaining. But there are old songs, as I ascertained from an intelligent and experienced street-singer, still occasionally heard in the open air, but more in the country than the metropolis. Among those still heard, however rarely, are the Earl of Dorset’s song, written on the night before a naval engagement with the Dutch, in 1665:
“To all you ladies now on land,
We men at sea indite.”
I give the titles of the others, not chronologically, but as they occurred to my informant’s recollection—“A Cobbler there was, and he liv’d in a Stall”—Parnell’s song of “My Days have been so wond’rous Free,” now sung in the streets to the tune of “Gramachree.” A song (of which I could not procure a copy, but my informant had lately heard it in the street) about the Cock-lane Ghost—
“Now ponder well, you parents dear
The words which I shall write;
A doleful story you shall hear,
In time brought forth to light.”
the “Children in the Wood” and “Chevy-chase.” Concerning this old ditty one man said to me: “Yes, sir, I’ve sung it at odd times and not long ago in the north of England, and I’ve been asked whereabouts Chevy-chase lay, but I never learned.”