The Vulgar Ballad
by Henry M. Belden
The Sewanee Review, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Apr., 1911), pp. 213-227
[Proofed once, footnoted moved to the end. The two texts "Constant Farmer's Son" and "Merchant's Daughter" are found after VI. They appear as an extended footnote after the beginning of VI.
R. Matteson 2014, 2016]
THE VULGAR BALLAD
In literary criticism, as in other studies involving social judgements, the word 'popular' is a fruitful source of confusion. It lends itself to the predilections of the critic almost as unreservedly as does that old ignis fatuus of argument, the word 'natural.' Criticism has therefore been obliged to guard the term by careful definition before venturing to use it as an instrument of literary analysis. It has remained for our own time, however, refining upon the rather vague enthusiasm of the early romanticists, to attempt a rational theory of popular origin for certain classes of poetry which shall separate such poetry ab ovo from the poetry of the schools. This is the theory of "communal origin;" and it is applied especially to the traditional ballad.
The traditional ballad, we are told, differs from other poetry not simply in style but in the way it is made. Not only is it anonymous, but it really has no author, at least no single author. It is made by the homogeneous dancing throng of primitive society. Other poetry may be popular in its appeal and may actually have popular currency may be sung by simple folk who are quite ignorant of its authorship but it is only the poetry that springs from the homogeneous dancing throng that should be described as popular. Inasmuch, however, as we can not in the very nature of the case produce documentary evidence of such origin for the ballads in our collections, recourse is had to stylistic peculiarities believed to be due to the communal method of composition to determine whether or no a given ballad goes back to a communal origin. Among these peculiarities are, in general, absence of the personal note, of reflection, of conscious artistry; and, in particular, certain structural differentiae, the most important of which are a way of leaping without transition from one situation to another, and the development of a situation by incremental repetition, as in Edward or Lord Randal. Though one can hardly avoid an uneasy suspicion of petitio principii in this process, the increased clarity and definiteness which it gives to our idea of the traditional ballad is a real gain in criticism.
In practice, the theory of popular origin is used to distinguish the traditional ballad not only from the literary ballad like Paul Revere or The Ancient Mariner, which have never had oral currency as anonymous song, but also from the vulgar ballad of the street, the ale-house, the lumber camp, the mine, the river, and the farmyard. These latter frequently live side by side with the traditional ballad in the hearts and on the lips of simple folk; they are almost always of untraceable origin, and are perpetuated from one generation to another orally as well as by print. When subjected to the test of style and structure, however, they are for the most part easily distinguishable from the traditional ballad, and are accordingly classified by the adherents of the theory of popular origin with the poetry of art. The vulgar ballad, that is to say, unlike the traditional ballad, is the work of an individual; its maker might, if he would, say with Touch stone, "A poor thing, sir, but mine own."
Anyone who will take the pains to make himself familiar with this vulgar ballad literature, whether in the output of the ballad press or in the oral literature of humble folk in our own time, is likely to be more impressed with its conventionality and impersonality than with its approach to the literature of conscious art. A careful comparison of vulgar balladry with the poetry of professed and acknowledged poets, especially when (as not in frequently happens) both use the same material, would undoubtedly throw much light upon the respective shares of individual invention and of traditional models in poetic production, and consequently upon the whole problem of popular poetry. The following rather miscellaneous notes make of course no such pretension. It will be enough if they suggest the value of a really critical study of the interrelation of the poetry of the street and that of the study.
I.
In the 'large room' of the British Museum, to which faithful students are admitted after a due period of probation, stands a row of solemn, dignified volumes represented in the Museum catalogue by the press-mark Bks. 3. g. 4. Here, amid surroundings certainly never dreamed of by the authors and publishers, the fliegende blaetter of the ballad printers of the last century, Pitts, and Such, and old Jemmy Catnach, "King of the Picts,' have found a dim and chilly immortality. Roaring songs of the public house, sentimental ditties of the faithful loves of soldiers, apprentices, political catches, and the last words (in verse) of noted criminals; execrably printed, for the most part, on galley slips of various sizes, with woodcuts of unimaginable rudeness; intended to be hawked about in the streets of the capital and at rural fairs, droned forth by beggars and cripples, or trolled out in the haunts of vulgar mirth, they have been carefully pasted into the somber folios of Bks. 3. g.4, and there await the curious student of nineteenth century civilization. Other volumes contain collections made in the provinces, Northumberland especially, and of a somewhat earlier date; still others contain blackletter broadside sheets going back to the seventeenth century.
Street ballads they are often called, and indeed their temper is prevailingly that of the street and the public-house, of the town. In the town they were printed, from the town they were distributed. Yet from the very beginning of ballad-printing they were sold and sung in the country. The pack that rogue Autolycus had filled in London found a ready market at the sheepshearing in sea-coast Bohemia; and Autolycus's successors from that time to our own have plied their trade not only in the streets of the capital but also at country fairs, in rustic ale-houses, and along the country roads. In fact, the vulgar ballad of the twentieth century, lineal descendant of that which delighted Dorcas and Mopsa in the sixteenth, is better known and loved, perhaps is more often made, in the country than in the city; and such connection as it has with the city seems likely to be maintained in the future rather by the mail-order house than by the begging or peddling ballad-singer.
Whether in town or country, this vulgar balladry has for the most part a common quality, more easily felt than defined, which we may call the quality of the street. Fashions, to be sure, change here as elsewhere, though more slowly; the easy conventions of this popular literature are not quite the same in the nineteenth century that they were in the seventeenth; yet the temper of it remains essentially the same in 1860 that it was in 1680. Its tone is unsophisticated without being exactly sincere; simple, but not fresh. A story of seduction or murder and its punishment, or a gallows repentance, is told with an evident intent of edification but without the accent of conviction. The woes of a faithful wife, one feels, are sung in the same gin-sodden voice that chuckles thickly over the ruse of a sharp-witted prostitute. Most sincere, perhaps, are the ballads of the returned soldier or sailor lover, found in countless versions but always reducible to one of three plots.
Either (1) the returned lover, in disguise, tests the faithfulness of his betrothed, finds her true, and is recognized by the broken ring or coin ; or (2) he comes back and finds her married or about to be married to another man, whereupon repentance, generally with a tragic outcome; or (3), pretending to be poor, he claims the fulfillment of her promise, is rejected and turned out of the house, then reveals his wealth and is besought to return, but rejects her with scorn. Those of the first group have commonly a conventional opening which has comedown in unbroken line from Shakespeare's day, if not from an earlier time. The lover is wandering, "One morning in May," in a meadow, or by a river, or on the seaside, and there comes upon a fair maiden "making her moan." One recalls Breton's "In the merry month of May, In a morn by break of day," and the still more delightful song of Barnfield's (or is it Shakespeare's), "As it fell upon a day, In the merry month of May." Unhappily, the resemblance holds only in the opening lines; our street ballad soon returns to the level of the street.
II.
Yet despite the general homogeneity of this vulgar poetry, the issue of the Seven Dials presses in the nineteenth century, and the work of earlier ballad printers too, show now and then a considerable range of taste in the public addressed. Not only do we find, every now and then, a genuine 'traditional' ballad in these street prints, "sticking fiery off," as Professor Glimmere says, "from the sooty mass" in which it is embedded; we find also modern book poetry, sometimes of a highly artistic quality. There is perhaps little occasion for surprise in finding Long fellow's Village Blacksmith on one of Such's broadsides.
Longfellow himself would probably have been pleased to see it there, since he once planned to have The Wreck of the Hesperus published in that way in Boston. But when we find Pitts filling out a sheet otherwise occupied by Harry Bluff and Spanish Ladies with the garden song from Maud, we are inclined to dis trust a too-rigorous classification of tastes. Certainly we cannot convict of unalloyed vulgarity the taste that could enjoy the following anonymous lyric, found on one of Catnach's sheets:--
SOFTLY SLEEP MY BABY BOY
O! softly sleep my baby boy,
Rock't by the mountain wind,
Thou dream'st not of a lover false,
Nor of a world unkind.
O! sweetly sleep, my baby boy,
Thy mother guards thy rest ;
Thy fairy clasp, my little joy,
Shall sooth her aching heart.
Wake, wake, and smile, my baby boy,
My heavy heart to cheer;
The wintry blast howls on the hill,
The leaf grows red and sear.
Oh! tell me, tell me, baby boy,
How shall I bear the cry,
When hunger gnaws thy little heart,
And death lights on thine eye.
Oh! was it meet, my baby boy,
That thou such weird should dree?
Sweet Heaven, forgive thy father false,
His wrongs to thee and me.
The printer has missed his rhyme in stanza II, and there is more than a suggestion of triteness in the last stanza; yet it is not merely its resemblance to Semela's lullaby in Menaphon nor its sharp contrast with most of Catnach's stuff that makes this little song seem poetic. It is an artistic lyric, a specimen not altogether contemptible of the poetry of culture. If its appear anee as part of Catnach's stock in trade is not a meaningless accident, it indicates that a taste for The Gosport Tragedy, Johnny German, and The Drunkard's Home is not incompatible with a liking for poetry.
III.
The prevailing temper of street balladry, as I have said above, can be more easily illustrated than defined. A good illustration of its romantic mood is afforded by a version of the story of the glove flung in the lions' pit, printed by both Pitts and Catnach and still current orally, in a somewhat abridged form, in Somerset. The fact that it has thrice been worked up by recognized poets, Schiller in Der Handschuh, Leigh Hunt in The Glove and the Lions, and Browning in The Glove, and that we know the story in a still earlier form which is probably the source of all the rest, enables us to compare the attitude and procedure of the vulgar balladist and the cultivated poet rather closely. The earliest known appearance of the story is in the Memoires of Branteme, published in 1666. M. de Lorge, a famous infantry captain under Francis I, is the hero, and the upshot is as in Schiller's poem and Leigh Hunt's. Hunt presumably got the story from Schiller's poem. Browning, who doubtless knew the versions of his two predecessors and Brantame's original anecdote as well, has drawn out the story to a new moral of his own, introducing another lover to point the moral and complete the romantic framework of the incident. Whence our street balladist drew the story, whether from Leigh Hunt, from Browning, or, as some think,[1] from popular tradition even older than Brant?me, I do not know. At least he has transformed it thoroughly into the temper of vulgar romance. Catnach's print runs thus:
THE FAITHFUL LOVER, OR THE HERO REWARDED
Near to St. James's there liv'd a lady,
She was of birth and high degree,
The fairest beauty in London city,
Five hundred pounds a year had she.
But she was of a resolution,
That no man her husband should be,
Unless it were some man of honour
In the wars by land or sea.
There was two young squires two young brothers
Came this lady for to view,
With a double resolution,
This young lady to pursue.
The one had a Captain's commission
Under the command of Colonel Carr
The other was a lieutenant,
On board the Tiger man of war.
O then bespoke the youthful lady,
I can but be one man's bride,
Come to me to-morrow morning,
And the matter I'll decide.
They went home till next morning,
Thinking on their fatal doom,
On their beds they lay musing,
Till the morning it was come.
When the morning it was coming,
To this lady they did repair,
The next morning very early,
To this lady they went so fair.
O then she bade her coach get ready,
And to the tower away-drove she,
There to spend one single hour,
All the rarities to see.
Lions they were fiercely roaring,[2]
Which put this lady in a swoon,
For the space of three long hours,
But when she had her senses found,
When she had herself recovered,
Into the den she threw her fan,
Saying which of you will wed a lady,
Of which of you will fetch my fan?
Then bespoke the faint-hearted Captain:
"Of your offers I don't approve,
Madam there is so many dangers,
I will not venture for your love."
Then bespoke the bold lieutenant,
With a voice so loud and high,
"Madam here is a man present,
Will fetch your fan or die."
Into the den he straightway enter'd,
Where the beasts they look'd so grim,
But still the man he grew more bolder,
And he looked as grim as them,
But when they saw the man was loyal,
Down before his feet they lay,
Then he stooped and the fan he gathered,
And he brought it safe away.
When she found the man was coming,
And no harm to him was done,
Then she said my dearest jewel,
Come and take the prize you've won.
Then bespoke the faint-hearted Captain,
Like a man that is disturbed in mind,
Saying into some shade I will wander,
Where no mortal shall me find.
IV.
The difference between the poetry of the study and that of the street is probably greatest in the departments of lyric and romance. In satire the two classes naturally draw closer together. 'Scommatic' poetry, as Hobbes called it, sprang from the crowd and generally makes its appeal to the crowd. Swift and Defoe, our two great prose satirists, sent forth their work anonymously through channels closely resembling the printing houses in Seven Dials. And Bks. 3. g. 4, volume IX, contains one rather striking instance of interchange, not of theme simply but of finished product, between the street and the study. Coleridge's The Devil's Thoughts is a daring and rollicking satire on the politics and politicians of the time, first printed in the Morning Post in 1799. It had a great run; it was imitated by Shelley in 1812 in a broadsheet entitled The Devil's Walk, and by Byron the year after in The Devil's Drive, and it was continued to an inordinate length by Southey (who, Coleridge tells us, dictated "the first three stanzas,, which are worth all the rest," of the original) in 1827. It is therefore not surprising to find a truncated copy of the original piece among the sheet ballads in Bks. 3. g. 4, and another in a northern collection of about the same date though its smartness and literary skill make it a pleasing surprise when one comes upon it. The surprise is lessened somewhat when one finds, in a collection of earlier ballads (Press-mark C. 22. f. 14), the late seventeenth century blackletter broadside of The Devil's Oak: or, his Ramble in a Tempestuous Night, where he hapn'd to a Discourse with Men of several Callings, of his own Colour and Complexion. To a very pleasant new Tune. Here, though Coleridge in his notes gives no hint of the fact, is the complete plan and much of the manner of The Devil's Thoughts. It is hard to believe that it was not this broadside or one of- its near relations that inspired Southey and Coleridge to the composition of their satire. Nor is that all. A comparison of The Devil's Oak with the Sow gelder's Song in Beaumont and Fletcher's Beggar's Bush (separately printed in Wit Restored, 1658) suggests that the vulgar balladist of the later built upon the courtly dramatist of the earlier seventeenth century; and it is most likely that Fletcher in turn got the suggestion for his sarcasm from some satirical street song.
V.
One comes to suspect that this instance is typical of the relation of the cultivated and the uncultivated in their use of literary material. The material of story and song does not work only up, as some evolutionists would have us believe, nor only down, as the now dominant theory of folk-tales seems to imply; instead, it is in a constant circulation, passing from the region of high art to that of vulgar legend, and thence back again, generally unrecognized, to the realm of literary art?
"Now up, now doun, as boket in a welle."
And who shall say, of any given tale, in which of our cultural strata it originated? In the Bks. 3. g. 4. collection are no less than four copies, by different printers of the nineteenth century, of The Constant Farmer's Son, the story of Keats's Isabella, told in the vulgar ballad style.[3] Keats got the story, as he tells us in the poem itself, from Boccaccio. But our Seven Dials balladist is little likely to have got it from either Keats or Boccaccio, at least directly. And where did Boccaccio get it In Keats, it is strangely romantic and highly literary. The four copies do not differ greatly. I print here one of them, and, as an illustration of the oral transmission of vulgar ballads in this country in our own time, a Missouri version of the same story.
Constant Farmer's Son it is regular vulgar romance. Did the story come up to Keats, or down to the vulgar balladist? In some cases the relation of a ballad to a literary poem on the same theme seems clear. When we find in The Squire of Edinburg (Bks. 3. g. 4, vol. Ill) the same plot as in Scott's Young Lochinvar, we know enough about Scott's tastes and methods of work to feel sure that the indebtedness is his. When we find a blackletter ballad of The Country Lass, who left her Spinning Wheel for a more pleasant Employment beginning "Sweet-faced Jenny received a Guinea," we feel that we know why Rossetti's Jenny is so named and begins as it does. But often we can only say that a vulgar and a literary form of the story coexists. We must let it go at that.
VI.
Even the most peculiar and out-of-the-way contrivances of the narrative artist are not safely his. Poe, we know, prided himself on originality of plot as well as of management. In 1846, commenting in Graham's Magazine upon a recent translation of Eugne Sue's Mysteries of Paris, he speaks in high praise of the story of Gringulet et Cottpe-en-Deux told by one of the characters in Sue's book.
Coupe-en-Deuxhas an ape remarkable for its size, strength, ferocity, and propensity to imitation. Wishing to commit a murder so cunningly that its discovery would be impossible, the master of this animal teaches it to imitate the functions of a barber, and incites it to cut the throat of a child, under the idea that, when the murder is discovered, it will be considered the uninstigated deed of the ape." The author of Murders in the Rue Morgue is much afraid his friends will think him guilty of the unpardonable sin of plagiarism, until he recalls that his story was printed in 1841 and that "some years ago, The Paris Charivari copied my story with complimentary comments." Ergo, Sue has copied from Poe, not Poe from Sue.
It may be so; but it is at least as likely that Sue got the notion from the same source from which Poe got it, and that that source is an anecdote the English form of which appears in a Durham broadside in the Bell collection (press-mark 11621. i. 12) and elsewhere. The date of the print is somewhere between 1780 and 1820, according to the Museum catalogue, clearly antedating both the French and the American story. The ballad is a humorous piece entitled The Monkey Turn'd Barber. An Irishman goes into a barber's shop for a shave and is waited upon in the barber's absence by a trained ape (presumably an orang-outang). He is duly lathered, and seems to suspect nothing until the ape begins to carve him, whereupon he starts up in wrath,
"Then in came the barber all trembling with fear,
To see the wild Irishman to stamp and to swear,
What's the matter my friend returned he,
Don't you see that big rogue your father's cut me.
Indeed I've no father, long time he's been dead,
It's your grandfather then with his ugly grey head,
He's gone up the chimney, he dare not come down,
By my soul if I had him I'd crack his old crown."
And Pat runs out to the street and consoles himself at a neighboring grogshop. Here clearly is the key to the mystery of the murders in the Rue Morgue; even the hint for the thrusting of the daughter's body up the chimney. Probably some orang-outang had really been trained to imitate his master's performances before the shaving-glass. It is possible, on the other hand, that the monkey of the ballad has come down from a higher literary level; that he is the illegitimate offspring of Sir Oran Haut-Ton of Melincourt[4]
THE CONSTANT FARMER'S SON
(Br. Museum Bks. 3. g. 4, Vol. I, p. 184; no printer's name given. The collection is said in the Museum catalogue to cover the period 1800-1870.)
It's of a merchant's daughter, in London town did dwell,
So modest tall and handsome her parents loved her well,
She was admired by lord and squire but all their hopes were vain,
For there was one 'twas a farmer's son young Mary's heart could gain.
Long time young William courted her and fix'd the wedding day,
Their parents all consented but her brothers both did say,
There lives a lord who pledged his word and him she shall not shun,
We will betray and then we'll slay her constant farmer's son.
A fair was held not far from town those brothers went straightway,
And asked young William's company with them to pass the day,
But mark, returning home again they swore his race was run,
There with a stake the life did take of the constant farmer's son.
These villians then returned home, oh sister, they did say,
Pray think no more of your false love but let him go his way,
For its truth we tell in love he fell all with some other one,
Therefore we came for to tell the same of the constant farmer's son.
As on the pillow Mary lay she had a dreadful dream,
She dreamt she saw his body lay down by a crystal stream,
Then she arose put on her clothes to seek her love did run,
When dead and cold she beheld her constant farmer's son.
The salt tears stood upon his cheeks all mingled with his gore,
She shriek'd in vain to ease her pain and kissed him ten times o'er,
She gather'd green leaves from the trees to keep him from the sun,
And night and day she pass'd away with her constant farmer's son.
But hunger it came creeping on poor girl she shriek'd with woe,
To try to find his murderer she straightway home did go,
Crying parents dear you soon shall hear a dreadful deed is done,
In yonder vale lies dead and cold my constant farmer's son.
Up came her eldest brother and said it is not me
The same replied the younger and swore most bitterly,
But Mary said don't turn so red nor try the laws to shun,
You've done the deed and you shall bleed, for my constant farmer's son.
These villains soon they owned their guilt and for the same did die
Young Mary fair in deep despair she never ceased to cry.
Their parents they did fade away, the glass of life was run,
And Mary cried in sorrow died for her constant farmer's son.
THE MERCHANT'S DAUGHTER
(Written down by C. M., a high-school pupil in West Plains, Mo., at the suggestion of his teacher, Miss G. M. Hamilton, who sent it to me. C M. learned it from his mother, who in turn learned it from hers. The mother, and so far as I know the grandmother, were reared in Missouri.)
In a seaport town there lived a merchant,
He had two sons and a daughter fair.
An apprentice-bound boy from all danger
Courted this merchant's daughter fair.
Five hundred pounds was made her portion;
She was a neat and cunning dame:
Her brothers were so hard and cruel,
All of this was to the same.
One evening they were silent, courting,
Her brothers chanced to over hear,
Saying, "Your courtship will soon be ended,
We will send him hither to his grave."
Next morning early, breakfast over,
With them a hunting he did go;
They went over hills and lofty mountains
And through some lonely valleys too,
Until they came to a lonely desert,
There they did him kill and throw.
When they returned back home that evening
Their sister asked for the servant man;
"We lost him in the woods a-hunting
And never more we could him find."
Next morning she was silent, weeping,
He came to her bedside and stood
All pale and wounded, ghastly looking,
Wallowed o'er in gores of blood.
Saying, "Why do you weep, my pretty fair one?
It is a folly you may pawn
Go over hills and lofty mountains,
This lonesome place you may me find."
She went over hills and lofty mountains,
And through some lonesome valleys, too,
Until she came to a lonesome desert,
And there she found him killed and throw.
His handsome cheeks the blood was dyeing,
His lips were salt as any brine;
She kissed him o'er and o'er crying,
"This dear beloved friend of mine."
Three days and nights she did stay by him,
'Twas on her bended knees she stood ;
All in the height of her great anger
She uttered forth such words as these:
"My love, I thought I would stay by him.
Until my heart should break with woe;
But I feel sharp hunger growing on me,
Which forces me back home to go."
When she returned back home that evening
Her brother asked her where she'd been.
"You hard and cruel and unkind creatures!
For him alone you both shall swing."
And then to avoid all shame and danger
Away to the sea they both did go.
The wind did blow and it was no wonder
The roaring sea proved both their graves.
VII.
It is time to bring these ramblings to a close. Let me do so with a striking proof that there is really no barrier; which is not to say, of course, that there is no difference between the pedestrian muse of street balladry and the most delicate lyric of art. We know how much Coleridge and Rossetti owed to the traditional ballad, and how much Kipling owes to the vulgar ballad of the street and the camp. As these have stooped to a lower cultural level for method and material, so the street balladist sometimes reaches up with clumsy fingers to try the delicate instrument of art.
In a collection of seventeenth century ballads (press-mark C. 22. f. 14, p. 159), is found the following blackletter broadside, "Printed for F. Coles, T. Vere, J. Wright, and J. Clarke."[5]
THE PENSIVE PRISONER'S APOLOGY
Directed to his Fellow-Prisoners wheresoever, wherein he adviseth them to be steadfast in faith and hope, and patiently to indure their careful imprisonment, and to keep their Vows, shewing the way to true liberty. Tune of Love with Unconfined Wings: Or, No, no, no, no, not jet.
Love with unconfined Wings, hovers about my gates,
And my divine Althema begins, to whisper at my grates,
When I lye tangled in her hair, being fettered in her eye,
The birds that wanton in the air, knows no such Liberty.
When like contented Linits I, with silver notes will sing,
The very meekness of the heart, and glory of the thing :
When I shall noise abroad and spread how good their vertues be,
Fishes that tipple in the deep, knows no such Liberty.
My lodging is on the cold boards, my cloaths are thin and bare,
False-hearted friends with flattering words, doth seek me to insnare:
They counsel me to change my mind, and so my words deny:
And I thereby shall surely find a perfect Liberty.
Faith, Hope, and Patience is my guide, my Conscience pure and clear,
So that the Lord be on my side, what Foe need I to fear?
I neither fear the stroke of Death, nor tyrants villany?
So soon as Christ receives my breath, I gain true Liberty.
A faithful vow I once did make, which now I will maintain:
Whilst I have tongue and breath to speak and life in me remain:
Rather then from Religion turn, in fiery flames to fry,
And if my Corps to ashes burn, my soul gains Liberty.
Patience makes plaisters for my sores love lives without controul,
They lock my body within the doors, but cannot lock my soul:
My Muses too and fro doth run, above and beneath the sky:
The greatest Potentate under the Sun, oft wants such Liberty.
Our Keepers cruelty is great, to one and to us all,
He bids us eat our flesh for meat, or stones that's in the wall :
Yet though I am in prison cast, my sences mount on high,
The wind that bloweth where it list, knows no such liberty.
'Tis neither pardon from the Pope nor prayers made to Saints,
That can inlarge my further scope nor shorten my complaints :
'Tis Christ above, the Lord of Love, which for mankind did dye,
None but he can pardon me, nor work my liberty.
There's many men hath Treasure store, yet are so worldly bent,
Having too much they scrape for more yet never are content,
Whilst I that am the poor'st of all from worldly care am free,
Which makes me think they live in thrall, and I at liberty.
The man that bears a wavering mind is subject to much woe,
He that to anger is inclin'd must sorrow undergo,
But he that hath a patient heart, though he a prisoner be,
Exceeds both nature, skill, and art, in point of liberty.
You pensive prisoners every one with hearts loyal and true,
This lines of mine to work upon, I dedicate to you.
Let faith and patience be your guide, and you in time shall see,
The powers of heaven will so provide you shall have liberty.
Stone walls cannot a prison make, nor Iron bars a Cage,
A spotless soul being innocent, calls that his hermitage
So I am blameless in my choice, and from all troubles free,
Angels alone that are above, enjoys such liberty.
What maundering conventicler is this, whose puritan soul, through thicker walls than those of his London prison, has heard the airy music of Lovelace's song and tried upon the wings thereof to send forth his own religious emotions? The church, to be sure, from early times has been ready to turn the powers of this world to its own uses; but I know of no other instance combining so many antitheses as this; the flippant courtier and the lowly religious enthusiast, the Anglican and the dissenter, the perfected lyric of art and vulgar balladry.
Henry M. Belden.
Footnotes:
1. See notes to the Somerset version in Folk Songs from Somerset. No. LVI.
2. This gives a hither date for the ballad. There was a royal menagerie at the Tower down to 1834, when the lions were removed to Regent's Park. Catnach began printing in London in 1814.
3. The four copies do not differ greatly. I print here one of them, and, as an illustration of the oral transmission of vulgar ballads in this country in our own time, a Missouri version of the same story.
4 Peacock's Melincourt, a genial satire upon Lord Monboddo's anticipations of Darwin (and Garnett) in The Origin and Progress of Language, was published in 1817.
5 These were ballad publishers of the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Another copy is printed in the Roxburgh Ballads, III, 178if., where the editor points out that the ballad parodies not only Lovelace but also, in the third stanza, a song "sung by Nell Gwyn in Howard's play All Mistaken," which is itself a parody of a song in Davenant's The Rivals,