"Robin, thou hast heard sung and say,
In gests and storys auld,
'The man that will not when he may
Sall hav nocht when he wald.'"
To the prologues of Gawin Douglas's translation of Virgil's Æneid, we are indebted for a knowledge of four old songs, a fact that outweighs in the opinion of some the merits of the work itself, which was the first translation of a classic that ever appeared in England.
In the Catalogue of Captain Cox's Library, printed in Laneham's letter on the Kenilworth entertainments, there is a short list of some of the popular ballads of his time, but it is sorely tantalizing to read of "a bunch of ballets and songs all auncient," "and a hundred more he hath fair wrapt in parchment, and bound with a whipcord." We learn the names of ballads which were popular in old Scotland from the Complaynt of Scotland, a most interesting list, which Mr. Furnivall has fully illustrated and explained in his edition of Laneham. Another source of information for learning the names of songs no longer known to exist are the medleys, which are made up of the first lines of many songs. The extreme popularity of ballads in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is reflected in the literature of the time, which is full of allusions to them. Burton, the anatomist of melancholy, who put a little of almost everything into his book, could not be expected to overlook ballads. He says: "The very rusticks and hog-rubbers ... have their wakes, whitson ales, shepherds' feasts, meetings on holy dayes, countrey dances, roundelayes ... instead of odes, epigrams and elegies, &c., they have their ballads, countrey tunes, O the Broom, the bonny, bonny Broom, ditties and songs, Bess a Bell she doth excel." The favourite songs of Father Rosin, the minstrel in Ben Jonson's Tale of a Tub (act i. sc. 2), are Tom Tiler, the Jolly Joiner, and the Jovial Tinker. The old drama is full of these references, and one of the most frequent modes of revenge against an enemy was to threaten that he should be balladed. Thus Massinger writes:—
"I will have thee
Pictur'd as thou art now, and thy whole story
Sung to some villainous tune in a lewd ballad,
And make thee so notorious in the world,
That boys in the street shall hoot at thee."[36]
Fletcher sets side by side as equal evils the having one's eyes dug out, and the having one's name sung
"In ballad verse, at every drinking house."[37]
The ballad-writers are called base rogues, and said to "maintaine a St. Anthonie's fire in their noses by nothing but two-penny ale."[38]
Shakspere was not behind his contemporaries in his contemptuous treatment of "odious ballads," or of "these same metre ballad-mongers," but he has shown by the references in King Lear and Hamlet his high appreciation of the genuine old work, and there is no doubt that the creator of Autolycus loved "a ballad but even too well."
There have been two kinds of collectors, viz. those who copied such fugitive poetry as came in their way, and those who bought up all the printed ballads they could obtain.
Of the manuscript collections of old poetry, the three most celebrated are the Maitland MS. in the Pepysian Library, Cambridge, the Bannatyne MS. presented by the Earl of Hyndford to the Advocates' Library, Edinburgh, and the famous folio MS. which formerly belonged to Percy, and is now in the British Museum. The Maitland MS., which contains an excellent collection of Scotch poetry, was formed by Sir Richard Maitland, of Lethington, Lord Privy Seal and Judge in the Court of Session (b. 1496, d. 1586). Selections from this MS. were printed by Pinkerton in 1786.