Transcribed from the 1863 Griffin Bohn and Co. edition byDavid Price,
FROM 1642 TO 1684
EDITEDBY
CHARLES MACKAY
LL.D.
LONDON
GRIFFIN BOHN AND CO
STATIONERS’ HALL COURT
1863.
p. iiJOHN CHILDSAND SON, PRINTERS.
The Cavalier Ballads of England,like the Jacobite Ballads of England and Scotland at a laterperiod, are mines of wealth for the student of the history andsocial manners of our ancestors. The rude but oftenbeautiful political lyrics of the early days of the Stuarts werefar more interesting and important to the people who heard orrepeated them, than any similar compositions can be in ourtime. When the printing press was the mere vehicle ofpolemics for the educated minority, and when the daily journalwas neither a luxury of the poor, a necessity of the rich, nor anappreciable power in the formation and guidance of publicopinion, the song and the ballad appealed to the passion, if notto the intellect of the masses, and instructed them in all theleading events of the time. In our day the people need noinformation p.ivof the kind, for they procure it from the more readilyavailable and more copious if not more reliable, source of thedaily and weekly press. The song and ballad have ceased todeal with public affairs. No new ones of the kind are madeexcept as miserable parodies and burlesques that may amuse sobercostermongers and half-drunken men about town, who frequent musicsaloons at midnight, but which are offensive to every oneelse. Such genuine old ballads as remain in the popularmemory are either fast dying out, or relate exclusively to thenever-to-be-superseded topics of love, war, and wine. Thepeople of our day have little heart or appreciation for song,except in Scotland and Ireland. England and America are tooprosaic and too busy, and the masses, notwithstanding all theirsupposed advantages in education, are much too vulgar to delightin either song or ballad that rises to the dignity ofpoetry. They appreciate the buffooneries of the“Negro Minstrelsy,” and the inanities and thevapidities of sentimental love songs, but the elegance of suchwriters as Thomas Moore, and the force of such vigorous thinkersand tender lyrists as Robert Burns, are above their sphere, andare left to scholars in their closets and ladies in theirdrawing-rooms. The case was different among our ancestorsp. vin thememorable period of the struggle for liberty that commenced inthe reign of Charles I. The Puritans had the pulpit ontheir side, and found it a powerful instrument. TheCavaliers had the song writers on theirs, and found them equallyeffective. And the song and ballad writers of that day werenot always illiterate versifiers. Some of them were thechoicest wits and most accomplished gentlemen of thenation. As they could not reach the ears of theircountrymen by the printed book, the pamphlet, or the newspaper,nor mount the pulpit and dispute with Puritanism on its ownground and in its own precincts, they found the song, the ballad,and the epigram more available among a musical and song-lovingpeople such as the English then were, and trusted to these tokeep up the spi