A pedlar's pack of ballads and songs. With illustrative notes

Front matter

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BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME FROM THE

SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND

Preface

A taste for the stupendous and extensive, combined with an assumption of wisdom and knowledge which our more sage ancestors never dreamt of, has led to an entire revolution in the manners and customs of the peasantry of this country. With a spurious desire to avoid what might be deemed "vulgar," the present generation have repudiated many things which formerly used to be regarded as institutions. Compare, for instance, a Country or Statute Fair of our time with the fairs of even twenty years ago, and mark well the difference. No stir, no bustle, no fun. Such a want of heart about everything ; such a listlessness ; and, notwithstanding the increased population, such a comparatively poor attendance. Learned Pigs, Spotted Indian Youths, Whitehaired Ladies, Fat Boys, the Speaking Fish, and other wonders of that kind, which were once reckoned great attractions to the common people, seem for ever banished. Dwarfs and Giants, also, which were only to be seen in itinerant shows on high days and holidays, have set about throwing off all connection with meanness and vulgarity, and now aim at raising their social position by assuming a style of grandeur and magnificence, and by putting a greater value, if that were possible, upon themselves. Their keeper, too, instead of being that honest-looking Yorkshireman in highlows, or that glib-tongued Irishman, who had just, by dint of a praiseworthy persevering spirit, emancipated himself from the thraldom of an agricultural " artist plying his sickle-y trade," now appears in the person of a fine gentleman with mustachios, a soft poetic voice, and

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arrayed in vestments which even the Prince of Wales might not object to. Instead of a Wooden Booth upon wheels surmounted by exaggerated daubs of the Giant " standing eight feet high *' on his stocking-soles, and of the Dwarf reckoning only two feet and a half in his tiny top-boots (which by the way were in company with a baby house too small to hold him, always hung up to air in sight of the general, public outside during the intervals of non-performance in order to beget an interest in what was going forward within), we find the best halls in London, and the most aristocratic rooms in country towns, hardly good enough for the reception of the distinguished exhibitors. No touter at the door invites you to "walk up ! step up ! just a-going to begin,'' nor does any stout lady with a muff sit for you in the moneytaker's box to ask you as you come out, how you have been pleased with the performance. Neither is there any stipulation that " your money will be returned " if everything is not as has been stated. No, everything is done upon the grand ; an "agent in advance," having hired the rooms, causes advertisements to be inserted in the Times and the other chief papers of the kingdom ; Photographic Portraits of the coming wonders are exhibited in prominent windows ; influence is made in every available quarter to obtain a command for the lusus naturce to appear and exhibit themselves before some member of the Royal Family, and trading upon this stamp, they modestly ask you to pay half a crown for a sight, which, some few years ago, would have been estimated at about just as many pence as is now demanded in the shape of shillings.

In Equestrian Exhibitions as well, instead of ostlers in dingy red jackets leading in the horses as of old, and assisting the clown to hold up the hoops, balloons, and long cloths for the star rider's leap, we have now a large number of gentlemen clad in blue long-tailed coats and white waistcoats, from which a casual spectator might imagine he had come into the presence of the Directors of the Bank of England out on .a lark for that particular evening.

PREFACE. Vll

Our street ballad singers are now also no more. They likewise have assumed the magnificent, and betaken themselves to gigantic places of public resort, adorned with mirrors and Dutch metal, grandiloquently termed "Music Halls," wherein they exercise their vocation (at a large fixed weekly stipend) amid the fumes of tobacco, the sound of corks being drawn, and a mixed aroma of bad (rummified) brandy, sawdust, and perspiration, from the hours of eight in the evening, till "the wee short hour ayont the twal," the music and words of their minstrelsy being of the very thinnest description, adapted of course, in a peculiar degree, to suit the taste of their degenerate audience.

" I'd rather be a kitten and cry ' mew ! ' Than one of these same metre ballad mongers. "

Another and a greater symptom of the growing desire for "the grand" is the entire absence from lanes and alleys of Broadsheet Ballads and of Flying-Stationers. To see such vulgar things as common songs disfigure the walls could not possibly be tolerated. Have we not our more wholesome cheap literature to instruct the nation ? Our lives of Heroic Highwaymen, in penny numbers. Our adventures of Detective Officers. Our sea-stories, to induce boys to disobey their parents and run away from home. Our Nicholas Nicklebys, to teach boys to despise and assault their teachers. And above all, have we not our newspapers full of descriptions of prize-fights, details of murders, the art of garotting and its defects, — in cases where the clumsy perpetrators have been discovered, — reports of Divorce Cases, Seductions, and Breaches of Promise, Burglaries, and " other articles too numerous to mention?" — all so much in excellence (to say nothing of the advantage in price) superior to hawkers' Broadsides, and tending to make people more " knowing " than there is any occasion for, so that as time goes on, intending murderers and house-breakers may so improve upon past atrocities, as to narrow the means of detection.

The vulgar Broadsheet Ballad thus being thrust from its legitimate ground by more pretentious, and in too many

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instances more questionable, literature, if we are compelled to truckle to the prevailing taste for the magnificent, there is no resource left, in order to preserve such old-fashioned legends, than to follow the footsteps of the Giants and the Dwarfs, and to appear before the public in a grander form and with a more popular aspect than of yore. There are happily still left amongst us very many beings who delight in such effusions, and who, like those who go to see our modern Giant, will not object to the higher price, in consideration of the superior manner in which our collection of ballads is now placed before them.

This collection was formed upwards of twenty years ago, it having been my intention to present it as my contribution to the members of the Abbotsford Club, to which I had then the honour to belong. Circumstances, however, having led to a change of residence from Edinburgh to Berwick-on- Tweed, my attention was for awhile directed to other matters, and having seceded from the Abbotsford Club, which was shortly afterwards broken up, and the MS. having fallen aside, my intentions as to printing were for a while abandoned.

Most of the ballads are from original Broadsides in the possession of Mr Maidment, a gentleman eminent as a collector of antiquarian lore, as an extensive contributor to that class of literature, and who is the chief Peerage Lawyer at present in Scotland. The late Mr C. K. Sharpe, known as the editor of Law's Memorials, Kirkton's Church History, and as a gentleman who, having figured in the best society of Edinburgh about the beginning of the present century, was full of much contemporaneous information and anecdote, having obtained a loan of a portion of Mr Maidment's collections to beguile the tedium of a few weeks when confined to the house by indisposition, took occasion to mark those Ballads which were deemed worthy of preservation, and suggested that they would make a desirable volume. Upon this hint, I had the ballads transcribed, and I have now much pleasure in presenting them, with some additions from other sources, for the acceptance of the more enlightened of the general public.

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It is somewhat remarkable that the volumes from which the bulk of these ballads has been extracted, twice escaped being destroyed by fire. On the first occasion, in February 1823, when the premises of Mr Abraham Thomson, the celebrated Bibliopogist, situated in the Old Fish Market Close, Edinburgh, were almost entirely consumed, and when a large amount of literary property left in his possession for binding was utterlylost. In particular, the reprint, by Mr David Laing, of Chepman and Millar's unique volume in black letter, preserved in the Library of the Faculty of Advocates, was so much destroyed that very few copies could be made up, and even these required to be partially inlaid, which renders the volume, when a copy occurs in the market, of very high pecuniary value. The second time was when the Great Fire in Edinburgh took place, in November 1824, the volumes having been in the hands of Mr Lockhart Frame, Bookbinder, as patterns.

W. H. L.

Berwick-on-Tweed, list Dec. 1 868.

Table Of Contents

NAUTICAL LYRICS,—

PAGE

Captain Ward, and the Rainbow, .... I

Contents

MILITARY— Continued The Valiant M'Craws, Wounded Nancy's Return, The Disappointed Lady, Bonnet o' Blue, Battle of Waterloo, The British Grenadiers, Aitcheson's Carabineers,

HIGHWAY,— Dick Turpin,

Everyone to His Own Trade, The Female Robber, The Crafty Farmer, The Yorkshire Bite, The Maid of Rygate,