Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/31

Rh INTRODUCTION. xxv They had no grace of tradition, these labored verses, whether didactic or scurrilous, and are to be kept carefully sundered from the " bunch of ballets and songs, all auncient,^^ — that is, ancient in 1575 — owned by Captain Cox,^ or from such songs as Moros sings by snatches in a comedy^ of that day, and says he can increase at will : I h(we twentie mo songs yet ; A fond woman to my mother^ As I was wont in her lappe to sit. She taught me these and many other. Of these two sources of confusion, one is no longer known, while the other, for our sins, abides with us and vexes us daily. Ritson, with good sense of the solidest quality, stated for English usage the distinction which now obtains. " With us," he says,* " songs of sentiment, edition of the Roxburghe Ballads (London, 1871 f.); for later times, see the Bagford Ballads (Hertford, 1878 f.). John Ashton has published A Century of Ballads, 1888. ^Fumivall, Captain Cox, in Ballad Society Publications, 187 1. Laneham wrote his famous letter from Kenilworth in 1575, and is very full of the captain, who hath " great oversight ... in matters of storie" and has at his fingers' ends such " histories " (note the word) as " Robinhood, Clim of the Clough, The King and the Tanner, and The Nutbrown Maid"; while' again his "balletts and songs " are such " az Broom broom on hil. . . Bony lass upon a green. . . and a hundred more he hath, fair wrapt up in parch- ment ..." 2 The Longer Thou Livest the More Foole Thou Art, often cited : see Ritson, Anc. Songs and Ball., LXXII ff. ' " A Historical Essay on the Origin and Progress of National Song," being the introduction to his Select Collection of English Songs, 3 vols., 2nd ed., 18 13. There is also good material in the introduction to his Ancient Songs and Ballads, 1790, and, edited by Hazlitt, 1877 ; see both the " Essay on Minstrels," and his account of old songs and music. In the introduction to his Ancient Engleish Metrical Romancees, he defines ballad as " a lyrical narrative." Digitized by LjOOQIC