Page:Merry Drollery Compleat 1875.djvu/25

Rh by Dr. Richard Corbet, Bishop successively of Oxford and Norwich (p. 234, and see his “Journey into France,” edit. 1661, p. 64), and probably by Archbishop Usher likewise (p. 110), the Merry Drollery may, perhaps, be regarded as a Bishop’s Book; if that be any compliment and recommendation. Even the Puritans and Sectaries would not have objected to it being so esteemed. But they held none of the Drolleries in favour; Choice Drollery being treated by them with the utmost rigour, so that its rare occurrence now is not anyway marvellous.

No good end can be served by exaggerating the importance of political ballads. We may leave the continually misquoted words of Fletcher of Saltoun quietly in a corner, for once, regarding the popular songs of a nation; inasmuch as, if the phrase he employed means anything at all, it makes quite as much for falsehood, and the misleading of public opinion, as it does for inducing sound judgment. The facts of the case are not hard to discover. Who among us would be willing to accept as final the verdict of some street rhymester or Mug-house politician, even although it found acceptance with a multitude of the gross vulgar? Your ballad-monger, your inventor of “Cocks,” your penny-a-liner for the prints that circulate amidst what we