He decided simultaneously that his own local studies must be illustrated,
and that be must come with the artist and show him just which bits to do,
not knowing that the two arts can never approach the same material from
the same point. He thought he would particularly like his illustrator to
render the Dickensy, cockneyish quality of the, shabby-genteel ballad-
seller of whom he stopped to ask his way to the street where Lindau
lived, and whom he instantly perceived to be, with his stock in trade,
the sufficient object of an entire study by himself. He had his ballads
strung singly upon a cord against the house wall, and held down in piles
on the pavement with stones and blocks of wood. Their control in this way
intimated a volatility which was not perceptible in their sentiment.
They were mostly tragical or doleful: some of them dealt with the wrongs
of the working-man; others appealed to a gay experience of the high seas;
but vastly the greater part to memories and associations of an Irish
origin; some still uttered the poetry of plantation life in the artless
accents of the end--man. Where they trusted themselves, with syntax that
yielded promptly to any exigency of rhythmic art, to the ordinary
American speech, it was to strike directly for the affections, to
celebrate the domestic ties, and, above all, to embalm the memories of
angel and martyr mothers whose dissipated sons deplored their sufferings
too late. March thought this not at all a bad thing in them; he smiled
in patronage of their simple pathos; he paid the tribute of a laugh when
the poet turned, as he sometimes did, from his conception of angel and
martyr motherhood, and portrayed the mother in her more familiar phases
of virtue and duty, with the retributive shingle or slipper in her hand.
He bought a pocketful of this literature, popular in a sense which the
most successful book can never be, and enlisted the ballad vendor so
deeply in the effort to direct him to Lindau's dwelling by the best way
that he neglected another customer, till a sarcasm on his absent-
mindedness stung hint to retort, "I'm a-trying to answer a gentleman a