sinking into a mere crowder upon an untuned fiddle, accompanying his
rude strains with a ruder ditty, the helpless associate of drunken
revellers, and marvellously afraid of the constable and parish
beadle."

There is proof enough that, by the reign of Elizabeth, the printer was
elbowing the minstrel out into the gutter. In Scotland the strolling
bard was still not without honor, but in the sister country we find
him denounced by ordinance together with "rogues, vagabonds, and
sturdy beggars." The London stalls were fed by Grub-street authors
with penny ballads--trash for the greater part--printed in
black-letter on broadsides. Many of these doggerel productions were
collected into small miscellanies, known as _Garlands,_ in the reign
of James I.; but few of the genuine old folk-songs found a refuge in
print. Yet they still lived on in corners of England and Scotland,
where "the spinsters and the knitters in the sun" crooned over
half-remembered lays to peasant children playing at their feet.

In 1723 a collection of English ballads, made up largely, though not
entirely, of stall-copies, was issued by an anonymous editor, not a
little ashamed of himself because of his interest in so unworthy a
subject; for although Dryden and Addison had played the man and given
kindly entertainment--the one in his _Miscellany Poems,_ the other in
_The Spectator_--to a few ballad-gypsies, yet poetry in general, that
most "flat, stale, and unprofitable" poetry of the early and middle
eighteenth century, disdained all fellowship with the unkempt,
wandering tribe.

In the latter half of that century, however, occurred the great event
in the history of our ballad literature. A country clergyman of a