preserved in the King's Pamphlets in the British Museum, and in
other collections which have been freely ransacked for the
materials of the following pages, as many thousands more have
undoubtedly perished. Originally printed as broadsides, and sold
for a halfpenny at country fairs, it used to be the fashion of the
peasantry to paste them up in cupboards, or on the backs of doors,
and farmers' wives, as well as servant girls and farm labourers,
who were able to read, would often paste them on the lids of their
trunks, as the best means of preserving them. This is one reason
why so many of them have been lost without recovery. To Sir W. C.
Trevelyan literature is indebted for the restoration of a few of
these waifs and strays, which he found pasted in an old trunk of
the days of Cromwell, and which he carefully detached and presented
to the British Museum. But a sufficient number of these flying
leaves of satire, sentiment, and loyalty have reached our time, to
throw a curious and instructive light upon the feelings of the men
who resisted the progress of the English Revolution; and who made
loyalty to the person of the monarch, even when the monarch was
wrong, the first of the civic virtues. In the superabundance of
the materials at command, as will be seen from the appended list of
books and MSS. which have been consulted and drawn upon to form
this collection, the difficulty was to keep within bounds, and to
select only such specimens as merited a place in a volume
necessarily limited, by their celebrity, their wit, their beauty,
their historical interest, or the light they might happen to throw
on the obscure biography of the most remarkable actors in the
scenes which they describe. It would be too much to claim for
these ballads the exalted title of poetry. They are not poetical
in the highest sense of the word, and possibly would not have been
so effective for the purpose which they were intended to serve, if