d was a form of art, and a low form of art. They were
written by hacks for the press, sold in the streets, and pasted on the
walls of houses or rooms: Jamieson had a copy of _Young Beichan_ which
he picked off a wall in Piccadilly. They were generally ornamented with
crude woodcuts, remarkable for their artistic shortcomings and
infidelity to nature. Dr. Johnson's well-known lines--though in fact a
caricature of Percy's _Hermit of Warkworth_--ingeniously parody their
style:--

'As with my hat upon my head,
I walk'd along the Strand,
I there did meet another man,
With his hat in his hand.'

Broadside ballads, including a few of the genuine ancient ballads, still
enjoy a certain popularity. The once-famous Catnach Press still survives
in Seven Dials, and Mr. Such, of Union Street in the Borough, still
maintains what is probably the largest stock of broadsides now in
existence, including _Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight_ (or _May Colvin_),
perhaps the most widely dispersed ballad of any.

Minstrels of all sorts were by this time nearly extinct, in person if
not in name; their successors were the vendors of broadsides.
Nevertheless, survivors of the genuine itinerant reciters of ballads
have been discovered at intervals almost to the present day. Sir Walter
Scott mentions a person who 'acquired the name of Roswal and Lillian,
from singing that romance about the streets of Edinburgh' in 1770 or
thereabouts. He further alludes to 'John Graeme, of Sowport in
Cumberland, commonly called the Long Quaker, very lately alive.' Ritson
mentions a minstrel of Derbyshire, and another from Gloucester, who
chanted the ballad of _Lord Thomas and Fair Eleanor_. In 1845 J. H.
Dixon wrote of several men he had met, chiefly Yorkshire dalesmen, not
vagrants, but with a local habitation, who at Christmas-tide would sing
the old ballads. One of these was Francis King, known then throughout
the western dales of Yorkshire, and still remembered, as 'the Skipton
Minstrel.' After a merry Christmas meeting, in the year 1844, he walked
into the river near Gargrave, in Craven, and was drowned. In Gargrave
church-yard lie the remains of perhaps the actual 'last of the
minstrels.'[8]

[Footnote 8: Unless we may attribute that distinction to the blind
Irish bard Raftery, who flourished sixty years ago. See various
accounts of him given by Lady Gregory (_Poets and Dreamers_) and
W. B. Yeats (_The Celtic Twilight_, 1902). But he appe