ercy Society in 1848-49.

In the present writer's bibliographical works, to which there is a
General Index, will be found an account of all that have come into the
market between 1866 and 1892. Thousands upon thousands have
unquestionably perished.

The most fascinating member of the Chap-Book series is undoubtedly the
_Garland_--not so much a volume by a given author, such as the _Court
of Venus_ (1558) and Deloney's _Garland of Good Will_, 1596, as a
miscellany by sundry hands. The next earliest of these collections
known to us at present are the _Muses' Garland_, 1603, and _Love's
Garland_, 1624. Those in Pepys's library at Cambridge are of much
later date, yet of some no duplicates can be quoted, so vast has been
the destruction of these _ephemerides_. Of the Pepysian Garlands a
certain proportion are reprints of older editions or repositories of
songs and ballads belonging to an anterior date, and here and there we
meet with lyrics extracted from contemporary dramatic performances.

Besides Pepys, Narcissus Luttrell the Diarist displayed a taste for
fugitive and popular publications, and the copies acquired by him
eventually found their way, for the most part, into Heber's hands,
whence they have drifted in large measure either into the British
Museum or the Miller and Huth collections. Numerous unique examples of
the popular literature of his own day, again, are preserved among
Robert Burton's books in the Bodleian.

Allied to the chap-book are the broadsides of various classes,
including the Ballad, popular and political, the Advertisement and the
Proclamation. So far as we know, the second division exhibits the most
ancient specimen in our own literature, and is a notification on a
single leaf by Caxton respecting Picas of Salisbury use. This
precious relic, of which only two copies are recorded, appeared about
1480. It must have been soon after the introduction of printing into
London and Westminster that resort was had to the press for making
public at all events matters of leading importance; but we do not seem
to possess any actual evidence of the issue of such documents save in
isolated instances till toward the end of the century, and they are
chiefly in the shape of indulgences and other ecclesiastical
manifestos, circulated in all probability in the most limited numbers
and peculiarly liable to disappearance.

The Ballad proper cannot be said to be anterior to the closing years
of Henry VIII., subs