The third he said it was a hawk,
And her bells were cut away.”
So also with some of the songs and ballads of Ophelia. They were too well known to be printed, and now they are irrecoverably gone.
We have lost nearly the whole of our earliest ballad poetry, and only a tithe of that which took its place has come down to us.
“Our earliest ballads,” says the editor of Percy’s folio, “though highly popular in the Elizabethan age, were yet never collected into any collections, save in Garlands, till the year 1723. They wandered up and down the country without even sheepskins or goatskins to protect them; they flew about like the birds of the air, and sung songs dear to the hearts of the common people—songs whose power was sometimes confessed by the higher classes, but not so thoroughly appreciated as to conduce them to exert themselves for their preservation.”
In the reign of Queen Anne and through the early Hanoverian period, sheets of copperplate were issued with engraved songs and ballads, together with their music. Among them may be found a few—but only a very few—of the old favourites. Most are compositions of Arne, Carey, Berg, Dunn, etc., and the words are quite unsuited to hold the attention of the peasantry. Hardly any of these found their way into broadsides and garlands, and none can now be heard by the cottage fire or in the village ale-house.
In 1808, John Catnach of Newcastle settled in London, and began to print broadsides. He was quickly followed by others in London and in country towns. Catnach kept a number of ballad-mongers in his pay, who either composed verses for him or swept up such traditional ballads as they chanced to hear. They were paid half-a-crown for a copy, whether original or adulterate. If one of these poetasters chanced to hear an ancient ballad, he added to it some of his own verses, so as to be able to call it his property, and then disposed of it to one of the broadside publishers.
If these men had been sent round the country to collect from cottages and village hostelries, in the way in which Wardour Street Jews send about into every part of England to pick up old oak, then a great amount of our traditional ballad poetry might have been recovered. It was not too late in the first ten or twenty years of this century. But this was not done. These pot-poets loafed about in the low London public-houses, where it was only by the rarest chance that a country man, fresh from the fields, and woods, and downs, with his memory laden with the fragrance of the rustic music, was to be found. Moreover, these fellows were overweening in their opinion of their own powers. They had neither taste, nor ear, nor genius. They poured forth floods of atrocious rhymes, and of utter balderdash, as was required, as an occasion offered, and as they stood in need of half-crowns. Consequently the broadside “white-letter” ballad no more represents the folk ballad of the English people than does the black-letter ballad.
Who that has a sprinkling of grey on his head does not remember the ballad-singer at a fair, with his or her yards of verse for sale? The ballad-seller, who vended his broadsheets, did much to corrupt the taste of the peasant. He had begun to read, and he read the ha’penny broadside, and learned by heart what he had bought; then he set it to some fine old melody as ancient as the Wars of the Roses, and sang it; and what is unfortunate, discarded the old words for the sake of the vile stuff composed by the half-tipsy, wholly-stupid band, in the pay of Ryle, Catnach, Harkness of Preston, Williams of Portsea, Snidall of Manchester, etc.