A large proportion of the black-letter ballads were of moral and religious import. In Beaumont and Fletcher’s “The Coxcomb,” the tinker refers to these, when he finds poor Viola wandering in the streets at night, and listens to her doleful words. He says:—
“What’s this? a prayer or a homily, or a ballad of good counsel?”
If we compare the black-letter issues of the sixteenth century with the snatches of ballads that come to us through the playwrights, we find that they do not wholly agree.
The dramatists made their characters sing the folk-ballads, the same that are described in “A Defence for Milksmaydes” in 1563.
“They rise in the morning to hear the larke sing,
And welcome with balletts the somer’s coming.
In going to milking, or coming away,
They sing merry balletts, or storeys they say.
Their mouth is as pure and as white as their milk;