reprobation, of contempt, or at
best of kindly condescension on the part of the official priesthood of
letters towards the humble tribe of balladists asserts itself, and how
long it endures.

Even Edmund Spenser, as quoted by Scott in the _Minstrelsy_, reproves
the Irish bards and rhymsters, as he might have done their Scottish
brethren, because 'for little reward or the share of a stolen cow' they
'seldom use to choose the doings of good men for the arguments of their
poems,' but, on the contrary, those of such men as live 'lawlessly and
licentiously upon stealths and spoyles,' whom they praise to the people,
and set up as an example to young men. A poetaster of the beginning of
the seventeenth century prays his printer that his book 'be not with
your Ballads mixt,' and that 'it come not brought on pedlars' backs to
common Fairs'--a prayer fulfilled to the letter. And down even to our
own century, a host of collectors, adaptors, and imitators have spoken
patronisingly of the elder ballads, and foisted on them additions and
ornaments that have not always or often been improvements.

The whirligig of time has brought in its revenges; and the final
judgment passed by posterity upon the respective claims of the formal
verse and the 'unpremeditated lay' of earlier centuries, has in large
measure reversed that of the age in which they were born. The former,
and particularly where it undertook to scourge the vices, the heresies,
and the follies of the period, lacks entirely that air of simplicity and
spontaneity--that 'wild-warlock' lilt, that 'wild happiness of thought
and expression'--which, in the phrase of Robert Burns, marks 'our native
manner and language' in ballad poetry certainly not less than in lyrical
song. The laureated bard, honoured of the Court and blessed by the
Church, is deposed from his pride of place, in the affections and
remembrance of the people at least, while the chant of the unknown
minstrel of 'the hedgerow and the field' goes sounding on in deeper and
widening volume through the great heart of the race, and is hailed as
the one true ballad voice.

Among the subjects which the Moral and Satirical Ballad selected for
censure were, it will be seen, the themes and the heroes of the humble
broadsheets sung at the common fairs and carried in the pedlar's pack.
Nor are we to wonder at this. Much of the contents of that pack is
better forgotten. Much even of what has been preserved might have been
all