THE LOVING BALLAD OF LORD BATEMAN.


In some collection of old English Ballads there is an ancient ditty which
I am told bears some remote and distant resemblance to the following Epic
Poem. I beg to quote the emphatic language of my estimable friend (if he
will allow me to call him so), the Black Bear in Piccadilly, and to assure
all to whom these presents may come, that "_I_ am the original." This
affecting legend is given in the following pages precisely as I have
frequently heard it sung on Saturday nights, outside a house of general
refreshment (familiarly termed a wine vaults) at Battle-bridge. The singer
is a young gentleman who can scarcely have numbered nineteen summers,
and who before his last visit to the treadmill, where he was erroneously
incarcerated for six months as a vagrant (being unfortunately mistaken
for another gentleman), had a very melodious and plaintive tone of voice,
which, though it is now somewhat impaired by gruel and such a getting up
stairs for so long a period, I hope shortly to find restored. I have taken
down the words from his own mouth at different periods, and have been
careful to preserve his pronunciation, together with the air to which he
does so much justice. Of his execution of it, however, and the intense
melancholy which he communicates to such passages of the song as are most
susceptible of such an expression, I am unfortunately unable to convey to
the reader an adequate idea, though I may hint that the effect seems to me
to be in part produced by the long and mournful drawl on the last two or
three words of each verse.

I had intended to have dedicated my imperfect illustrations of this
beautiful Romance to the young gentleman in question. As I cannot find,
however, that he is known among his friends by any other name than
"The Tripe-skewer," which I cannot but consider as a _soubriquet_, or