CHAPTER XI.
’Tis Ale, immortal Ale I sing! Bid all the Muses throng! Bid them awake each slumbering string, Till the loud chords responsive ring To swell the lofty song!
These venerable ancient song inditers Soar’d many a pitch above our modern writers; Our numbers may be more refin’d than those, But what we’ve gained in verse we’ve lost in prose; Their words no shuffling double meaning knew, Their speech was homely, but their hearts were true.
OLD BALLADS, SONGS AND VERSES RELATING TO ALE AND BEER.
ONG ago, in the merry days when the chilling influence of Puritanism had not yet put an end to the majority of our sports and pastimes, and when anyone who had ventured to speak of a May-pole as a “Stinckyng Idoll” would most likely have been ducked in the nearest pond as a proper reward for his calumny, the lower orders of England were far more musical than at present; and there existed a great demand for ballads to be sung at village merry-makings, ale-house gatherings, and during the long winter evenings which would have been dull indeed without the cheering influence of song. {295}
Of the quaint old ballads, written mostly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a splendid collection was made by the Earl of Oxford (born in 1661), to whom we are also indebted for the Harleian MSS., now in the British Museum. These ballads are known as the Roxburghe Collection, and a selection of them is given in this chapter, together with facsimile reproductions of the curious woodcuts with which the originals are adorned.[62]
[62] Most of the Roxburghe Ballads have been reprinted by the Ballad Society, and for the very scanty information we have been able to gather concerning them we are in a great measure indebted to the Editors of these reprints. Our illustrations have been taken in every case from the original ballads, and are, we believe, the only exact facsimile reproductions in existence.