Ballad Book | Page 4

native gentlewoman from among the peasants on her father's estate.
"She was forced," writes Carmen Sylva, Queen of Roumania, one of
the two translators, "to affect a desire to learn spinning, that she might
join the girls at their spinning parties, and so overhear their songs more
easily; she hid in the tall maize to hear the reapers crooning them, ...
she listened for them by death-beds, by cradles, at the dance, and in the

tavern, with inexhaustible patience.... Most of them are improvisations.
They usually begin and end with a refrain."
The Celtic revival, too, is discovering not only the love of song, but, to
some extent, the power of improvisation in the more remote corners of
the British Isles. Instances of popular balladry in the west of Ireland are
givrn by Lady Gregory in her Poets and Dreamers.
The Roumanians still have their lute-players; old people in Galway still
remember the last of their wandering folk-bards; but the Ettrick
Shepherd, a century ago, had to call upon imagination for the picture of
"Each Caledonian minstrel true,
Dressed in his plaid and bonnet blue,

With harp across his shoulders slung,
And music murmuring round
his tongue."
Fearless children of nature these strolling poets were, even as the songs
they sang.
"Little recked they, our bards of old,
Of autumn's showers, or winter's
cold.
Sound slept they on the 'nighted hill,
Lulled by the winds, or
bubbling rill,
Curtained within the winter cloud,
The heath their
couch, the sky their shroud;
Yet theirs the strains that touch the
heart,--
Bold, rapid, wild, and void of art."
The value and hence the dignity of the minstrel's profession declined
with the progress of the printing-press in popular favor, and the
character of the gleemen suffered in consequence. This was more
marked in England than in Scotland. Indeed, the question has been
raised as to whether there ever existed a class of Englishmen who were
both ballad-singers and ballad-makers. This was one of the points at
issue between those eminent antiquarians, Bishop Percy and Mr. Ritson,
in the eighteenth century. Dr. Percy had defined the English minstrels
as an "order of men in the middle ages, who subsisted by the arts of
poetry and music, and sung to the harp the verses which they
themselves composed." The inflammable Joseph Ritson, whose love of
an honest ballad goes far to excuse him for his lack of gentle demeanor

toward the unfaithful editor of the Reliques, pounced down so fiercely
upon this definition, contending that, however applicable to Icelandic
skalds or Norman trouveres or Provençal troubadours, it was
altogether too flattering for the vagabond fiddlers of England, roughly
trolling over to tavern audiences the ballads borrowed from their betters,
that the dismayed bishop altered his last clause to read, "verses
composed by themselves or others."
Sir Walter Scott sums up this famous quarrel with his characteristic
good-humor. "The debate," he says, "resembles the apologue of the
gold and silver shield. Dr. Percy looked on the minstrel in the palmy
and exalted state to which, no doubt, many were elevated by their
talents, like those who possess excellence in the fine arts in the present
day; and Ritson considered the reverse of the medal, when the poor and
wandering gleeman was glad to purchase his bread by singing his
ballads at the ale-house, wearing a fantastic habit, and latterly sinking
into a mere crowder upon an untuned fiddle, accompanying his rude
strains with a ruder ditty, the helpless associate of drunken revellers,
and marvellously afraid of the constable and parish beadle."
There is proof enough that, by the reign of Elizabeth, the printer was
elbowing the minstrel out into the gutter. In Scotland the strolling bard
was still not without honor, but in the sister country we find him
denounced by ordinance together with "rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy
beggars." The London stalls were fed by Grub-street authors with
penny ballads--trash for the greater part--printed in
black-letter on
broadsides. Many of these doggerel productions were collected into
small miscellanies, known as Garlands, in the reign of James I.; but
few of the genuine old folk-songs found a refuge in print. Yet they still
lived on in corners of England and Scotland, where "the spinsters and
the knitters in the sun" crooned over half-remembered lays to peasant
children playing at their feet.
In 1723 a collection of English ballads, made up largely, though not
entirely, of stall-copies, was issued by an anonymous editor, not a little
ashamed of himself because of his interest in so unworthy a subject; for
although Dryden and Addison had played the man and given kindly

entertainment--the one in his Miscellany Poems, the other in The
Spectator--to a few ballad-gypsies, yet poetry in general, that most "flat,
stale, and unprofitable" poetry of the early and middle eighteenth
century, disdained all fellowship with the unkempt, wandering tribe.
In the