Page:Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript. Ballads and Romances.djvu/5

Ballad Society THE completion of the edition of the Percy Folio seems a good opportunity for proposing to print all the other collections of Ballads. The importance of Ballads for the student of history, of society and manners, of thoughts and customs, in former days, is admitted by all writers and thinkers. These light hand-glasses reflect for us many a feature of the times that is lost in the crowded scenes which larger mirrors, hung at other angles, present to our view; and without the sight of the Ballad pictures, as well as the larger and more formal ones of professed Histories, State-Papers, Memoirs, and Treatises, we cannot know faithfully, or, at least, we can not know as faithfully as we have the means of knowing, the lineaments of the ages that have preceded us. That it is the duty of the student of history to endeavour so to know those lineaments, as well in their nobleness as their commonplaceness and deformity, no real student will question, He wants the portraiture of each age as complete as he can get it; he desires to study all its expressions, of power, of whim, of impulse, of faith, of nobleness and baseness; and many of these he can get from Ballads alone. Now the known collections of printed Ballads are the Pepys at Magdalene College, Cambridge; the Roxburghe, the Bagford, and the King's Library Political Ballads, in the British Museum; the Ashmole, Douce, and Rawlinson at Oxford ; Mr Euing's at Glasgow (from Bp Heber's Library) ; and small ones in the Antiquaries' Society, &c. Manuscript Ballads are also at Oxford and elsewhere. The Ballad Society proposes to print the whole of these collections, so far as it can, with copies of the original wood-cuts to such of the Ballads as have them, and Introductions when needed. Were the Pepys collection a public one, it would be the first chosen for issue by the Society : but the Fellows of Magdalene have for some time had the intention of someday printing the collection themselves are indeed now indexing it and they may carry out their intention independently of