We'll stand it out and look about; The masters we don't heed 'em,- Britannia's rights and freedom. Here's a health unto the builder's men, And they must have it very quick, Will be took up for lunatic." The next quotation is from a ballad which came out later in the autumn, when the contest was in another phase. The masters were trying to fill their shops with non-society men, and the feeling was much more bitter than at first. Under the circumstances we cannot help wondering at the continued good temper of the ballads, which, it must be remembered, would be absolute failures and losses if they did not jump with the humour of the moment, and are therefore a very fair test of what that feeling must have been at the time amongst the mass of the work-people: "Let all those crawlers go in and work They're not used to handle a knife and fork; Let them employ non-society men, They did begrudge to pay the smart ; Then be good-tempered to a man, The contrast between the spirit and temper of the ballads of the present day on the questions as to which one would expect the most bitter feeling to prevail, and those of fifteen or twenty years ago, is certainly both remarkable and encouraging. Without putting their evidence at more than it is worth, so far as it goes it is unmistakable proof of a very much better state of things. In no department is this more apparent than in Church matters, which are now handled in the streets in a spirit of conservative Protestantism. The ballads come out by shoals when any ecclesiastical event of more than common interest is stirring, such as the Pope's celebrated move which produced the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, and the riots at St. George's-in-the-East. The following chorus from one of the ballads on the former topic may be taken as a fair specimen : "Old England does not care a fig For Rome or cardinal, pope or pig. And sell your crucifix and wig. We'll have no bull shoved down our throat. Cheer up, and shout, Down with the Pope, The ballad-singer has a decided distaste for the confessional and "beautiful garments;" but even these cannot rouse him for more than a moment or two out of his habitual good-humour. It is difficult in the St. George's ballads to find any thing more severe than such verses as the following: "Come all you sporting parsons, And listen to my song, About the fight to save our souls, King Bryan of St George's, He swears by all that's right, In spite of all Whitechapel dogs, Let Hugh Allen then go forward, The religion of our forefathers And reckon old King Bryan As a very wicked boy. Let no animosity be shown; To your religion all stand true, Both Protestants and Catholics, And you'll never have cause to rue. Let each his own opinion have, And no one then annoy; Each to his own church take his way, From the old man to the boy." A good deal of painful scandal would have been saved us had people in higher positions in life acted on the ballad-writer's principles. The only distinct classes of ballads which remain are those on prize-fights and sporting-matches, and on war topics. The former are very poor indeed; we have seen between thirty and forty, for instance, on the fight between Sayers and Heenan, not one of which rises to the common average of merit. The war ballads are quaint enough, many of them. Havelock and Lord Clyde have been the popular heroes in the streets, as elsewhere, but they cannot come near Miss Nightingale. She is the heroine of as many ballads as the Cid, from only one of which we have space to quote: "When sympathy thy breast did enter, When through danger you did venture, Noble was thy good intentions; The seas thou braved through storm and gale; Of the sweet Miss Nightingale, Every heart with joy shall beat then. By thy care and close attention Many a soldier's life was saved, His features ghastly wan and pale, The lovely sweet Miss Nightingale." Besides the ballads which may be thus roughly classified, there are the great mass, which deal with the habits, follies, and passing events of the day, of which it is impossible to give any idea. But we may safely say, that there is still a very large section of the British public, though probably a decreasing one, which must and will have life put into doggrel verse for its special delectation. A visit to the stall of a pinner-up, or to the place of business of any of the publishers of ballads, will convince any reader of this fact who may not be willing to take our word. For the benefit of such we may say that there is a very intelligent pinner-up whose pitch is close by St. Pancras Church in the New Road, and perhaps the largest publisher in England is Fortey, in Monmouth Court, the successor of the great Catnach. Catnach was the Leo X. of street publishers. We have often heard, and still believe, though his successors deny the fact, that he kept a fiddler day and night in a back room, where he used to sit, like Old King Cole, with a pot of ale and a long clay, receiving ballad-writers and singers, and judging of the merits of any production which was brought to him by having it sung then and there to some popular air played by his fiddler. His broad-sheets contain all sorts of songs and ballads, for he had a most catholic taste, and introduced the custom of taking, from any writer living or dead, whatever he fancied, and printing it side by side with the productions of his own clients. He also appears to have first filled up the corners of his broad-sheets with sentiments, which custom still obtains more or less. We find, for instance, the following, amongst others, on some of the last sheets we have purchased: "Honour and affluence to the patrons of trade, liberty, and property." "Improvement to our arts, and invention to our artists." "May our commanders have the eye of a Hawke, and the heart of a Wolfe." 66 May the meanest Britain scorn the highest slave." 66 May French principles never corrupt English manners." "May the produce of Britain never exceed her consumption." We cannot echo the last sentiment, which is the only one of at all a dangerous tendency we have come across. The great Catnach was equally catholic as to the woodcuts with which he was wont to adorn his broad-sheets. These are taken from any source, with an equal disregard of the laws of copyright and fitness. In most cases they have not the slightest reference to the ballad of which they form the head-piece. To take the first instances at hand, our copy of "Sally Brown" is headed by a well-worn cut of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza riding, with the windmills in the distance, in which we are much mistaken if we do not recognise the early hand of George Cruikshank. Tom Bowling comes under an old Dutch cut of a dame in a steeple-hat, sitting at a table with four wondrous figures before her, one of whom seems to be presenting her with a pug dog or some unknown animal, and the others to be applauding with uplifted hands; while "The Poacher" comes under a cut of a youth with a large watering-pot tending flowers, in what, from the number of cypresses, we take to be a cemetery. The decay of the street ballad-singer, which is a fact beyond question, and which we attribute more to the establishment of such places of amusement as Canterbury Hall and the Oxford, and the sale of penny song-books, than to the advance of education or the interference of the police, will probably be followed by the disappearance of the broad-sheet, and may silence the class of authors who write the street ballads. We do not pretend to say that they will be any great loss. At the outset we told our readers that we had nothing either wise or witty to produce to them. But we must say, speaking from a large ac quaintance with their productions, that, taken as a whole, their speech, though often coarse and rude, is honest and right-minded, and much less likely to do harm to their readers than most of the religious newspapers of our day, or many other organs of high repute in the world. And inasmuch as they still form the principal light reading of a very large number of our fellow countrymen and country women, we cannot think any apology is needed for casting a look at them, little as in themselves they may be calculated to interest or profit us. We have not yet, however, spoken of what is to us the most remarkable, as well as the most satisfactory, side of our subject. The ballad-singer, with his rough broad-sheet, travelled, as we have seen, over the whole surface of man's life, political and social. There was one time of the year, however, when he went out of his every-day path, and touched on deeper matters than accidents, murders, battles, or politics. Christmas brought to him, too, and to his audience, its witness of the unity of the great family in heaven and earth, its story of the life and death of Him in whom that unity stands. The Christmas broad-sheet, of which several copies lie before us, has several distinctive marks which show that it was an object of more than ordinary care to publishers and ballad-singers. In the first place, these Christmas sheets are double the size of the ordinary broad-sheet, and contain four or five carols-generally one long narrative ballad of some twenty verses, and three or four short pieces. Each of them is headed by a large woodcut roughly coloured (and so far as our experience goes, in these alone is colour ever used), of the crucifixion, the raising of Lazarus, or some kindred subject, in which, although modern Gothic churches and men in strange costumes are introduced, there is nothing whatever to shock the most reverent Christian. Small woodcuts, also coloured, of the ark, the last supper, the resurrection, are scattered over the sheet, and the printing is much more careful than usual. Looking at these Christmas broad-sheets, it really would seem as if the poorest of our brethren claimed their right to higher nourishment than common for their minds and souls, as well as for their bodies, at the time of year when all Christendom should rejoice. And this first impression is confirmed when we examine their contents. In all those which we have seen, the only piece familiar to us is that noble old carol," When shepherds kept their flocks by night." Where the rest come from, we cannot even conjecture; but in the whole of them there is not one which we should wish were not there. We have been unable to detect in them even a coarse expression; and of the hateful narrowness and intolerance, the namby-pamby, the meaningless cant, the flaccid EE |