Page:Political ballads of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (IA politicalballads01wilk).pdf/14

 tion and the highest defcriptive powers, could never have effected without them. It was from thee long-neglected picture-writings of great hitorical cenes, and of the celebrated individuals who are crowded in them—“in their habit as they lived”—that he derived o much of his wonderfully minute knowledge of all that related to the tirring times of the eventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To thee depied and inexhautible ources of information, he was principally indebted for his life-like delineations of character; for his decriptions of popular commotions; and, not unfrequently, for his knowledge of the motives by which public men were actuated, at particular conjunctures, in their conduct.

The admirable ue made of them by Lord Macaulay, in his hitorical fragment and eays, has uggefted the idea of collecting and republihing the following pecimens. They have been gleaned from exceedingly rare (not a few, I believe, unique) ingle-heets and broadides, old manucripts, and contemporary journals, in the national and other libraries. A few have been extracted from very carce volumes, which were published at the cloe of the eventeenth or early in the eighteenth century; and fewer till have been derived from more