Accession Of James II
On The Most High And Mighty Monarch King James
In A Summer's Day




INTRODUCTION.



The Cavalier Ballads of England, like the Jacobite Ballads of
England and Scotland at a later period, are mines of wealth for the
student of the history and social manners of our ancestors. The
rude but often beautiful political lyrics of the early days of the
Stuarts were far more interesting and important to the people who
heard or repeated them, than any similar compositions can be in our
time. When the printing press was the mere vehicle of polemics for
the educated minority, and when the daily journal was neither a
luxury of the poor, a necessity of the rich, nor an appreciable
power in the formation and guidance of public opinion, the song and
the ballad appealed to the passion, if not to the intellect of the
masses, and instructed them in all the leading events of the time.
In our day the people need no information of the kind, for they
procure it from the more readily available and more copious if not
more reliable, source of the daily and weekly press. The song and
ballad have ceased to deal with public affairs. No new ones of the
kind are made except as miserable parodies and burlesques that may
amuse sober costermongers and half-drunken men about town, who
frequent music saloons at midnight, but which are offensive to