Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/27

Rh INTRODUCTION. xxi as his "ingyne can put in memorie"; among others, there were " The Hunt's Up," a lively tune, " Robene hude," and " Ihonne Ermistrangis dance." Whether in singing or even in dancing, little distinction was made between the narrative song and the pure lyric. Ballads of every sort were hawked about the land in baskets,^ or sung by " blind crowders " as preliminary to a sale. In Beaumont and Fletcher's " Monsieur Thomas," the fiddler gives a list of his "best ballads," most of them lyrical; while in "Rollo"^ three culprits sing before their execution a "ballad," with a well-known refrain,^ in imitation of those doleful last confessions of criminals, the so-called Good Nights. But we may find wider margins for the word. We read of a translation, made in those days, of " The Canticles or Balades of Solomon,"* a title that would have pleased Herder. Moreover, alternating with the ballad, comes another unstable term in the sonnet. The Lapientation of George Mannington is entered in the books of the Stationers' Company, 1576, as "a woeful ballad," and is printed in a collection of poems, 1584, as "a sorrowfuU sonet." ^ The close connection of ballads and the dance may have been in Udal's mind when he spoke ® of " wanton daunsynges or folyshe ballettes wherewith the Gentiles crie upon theyr devilles"; for tunes were not composed 1 Country-houses, inns, and the like, were sure to have ballads upon the walls. (See Addison, Spectator^ No. 85.) "An honest alehouse," says Walton's " Angler," " where we shall find a cleanly room, lavender in the windows, and twenty ballads stuck about the wall," — cleanly ballads, and old, we feel sure. 2 End of Act iii. for such ballads themselves, see Chappell, I, 162. Digitized by LjOOQIC
 * The tune in Chappell, I, 216. For the "hanging tune" used
 * Printed in 1 549. In the Bishop's Bible it is The Ballet 0/ Ballets.
 * Ritson's Ancient Songs and Ballads, Hazlitt, p. 188.
 * See Richardson's Dictionary, s. v.