The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman, by Charles
Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray, Illustrated by George Cruikshank

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Title: The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman

Author: Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray

Release Date: April 14, 2005 [eBook #15618]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

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THE LOVING BALLAD OF LORD BATEMAN.

ILLUSTRATED BY GEORGE CRUIKSHANK.

London
Charles Tilt, Fleet Street
and Mustapha Syried, Constantinople

MDCCCXXXIX

Warning to the Public

CONCERNING

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 mou