Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/30

xxiv xxiv INTRODUCTION. Northumberland." So the good and the bad fell into one class. Shakspere loved an old ballad, and speaks his mind in Orsino's pretty words; but there is sarcasm in the "ballad-maker," of other passages. Probably Elizabethans recognized the difference, but they did not pick terms to tell it. Indeed, much of the balladry con- demned itself. There was, to be sure, respectable poverty in the rude chronicles which were beaten into rime, and Aubrey said that his nurse could repeat in ballads the history of England from the conquest to the first Charles; ^ but Mr. Stopford Brooke praises the ballading gentry too much when he credits them with the educa- tional value of "a modern weekly review."^ Much of their work was mere shreds and tatters of sensation, and so persistent that " scarce a cat can look out of a gutter . . . but presently^ a proper new ballet of a strange sight is indited."* Trash of the sort, "rimes that run in large in every shop to sell," brought the whole family of ballads into contempt, and called down the wrath of Puritan writers even in the days of Elizabeth.^ These broadsides were hawked about and sung, like other ballads. Says a couplet prefixed to one of them: * / know no reason but that this harmless riddle May as well be printed as sung to a fiddle, 1 Percy Folio, II, 265; III, 163. 2 Primer of Eng. Lit., p. 73. a "monsterus pygge." ^ Percy Society Publications, I, p. 49. Ballad-singers were sup- pressed along with " stage-plays " in 1648. Deloney and others began to collect their ballads into " little miscel- lanies," which were called Garlands. More of the sort, with a good introduction by Chappell, may be found in the Ballad Society's Digitized by LjOOQIC
 * Le.j 1592. See Chappell, I, 106.
 * E.g., see Arber Reg. Stat. Co., I, 187, for a ballad on the birth of
 * Percy Collection of Broadsides, Vol. III. Under James I,