Page:Political ballads of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (IA politicalballads01wilk).pdf/10

 influence about the Court, and in the government of the country, and who, rather as an exercie of a uppoed neceary accomplihment than from any baer motive, occaionally amued themelves with ridiculing the foibles of majety, and expoing the intrigues of their rivals for his confidence. Such writers are manifetly no exponents of the popular mind: the vast majority of their compoitions have long ince fallen into neglect, almot oblivion, and are never likely again to interet, much les influence, any clas of readers.

Whilt every other department of literature has been thoroughly explored, amplified, and variouly illutrated, our modern Political Songs and Ballads—the bet popular illutrations of hitory—contitute the olitary exception to the general rule. Two caues in particular may be aigned for the ingular indifference with which uch compoitions have been hitherto treated. In the first place, they are o diffuely cattered as to render hopeles any attempt by a ingle individual to make, if uch a thing were deirable, an entire collection of them, or indeed any approximation to it; and econdly, their rarely poeing any literary merit.

There are, however, few compoitions more