cipline."[60] The
Portuguese soldiery in Ceylon, at the siege of Colombo, when pressed
with misery and the pangs of hunger, during their marches, derived not
only consolation, but also encouragement, by rehearsing the stanzas of
the Lusiad.

We ourselves have been a great ballad nation, and once abounded with
songs of the people; not, however, of this particular species, but
rather of narrative poems. They are described by Puttenham, a critic in
the reign of Elizabeth, as "small and popular songs sung by those
_Cantabanqui_, upon benches and barrels' heads, where they have no other
audience than boys, or country fellows that pass by them in the streets;
or else by blind harpers, or such like tavern minstrels, that give a fit
of mirth for a groat." Such were these "Reliques of Ancient English
Poetry," which Selden collected, Pepys preserved, and Percy published.
Ritson, our great poetical antiquary in these sort of things, says that
few are older than the reign of James I. The more ancient songs of the
people perished by having been printed in single sheets, and by their
humble purchasers having no other library to preserve them than the
walls on which they pasted them. Those we have consist of a succeeding
race of ballads, chiefly revived or written by Richard Johnson, the
author of the well-known romance of the Seven Champions, and Delony, the
writer of Jack of Newbury's Life, and the "Gentle Craft," who lived in
the time of James and Charles.[61] One Martin Parker was a most
notorious ballad scribbler in the reign of Charles I. and the Protector.

These writers, in their old age, collected their songs into little penny
books, called "Garlands," some of which have been republished by Ritson;
and a recent editor has well described them as "humble and amusing
village strains, founded upon the squabbles of a wake, tales of untrue
love, superstitious rumours, or miraculous traditions of the hamlet."
They enter into the picture of our manners, as much as folio chronicles.

These songs abounded in the good old times of Elizabeth and James; for
Hall in his Satires notices them as

Sung to the wheel, and sung unto the payle;

that is, sung by maidens spinning, or milking; and indeed Shakspeare had
described them as "old and plain," chanted by

The spinsters, and the knitters in the sun,
And the free maids that weave their threads with bones.
_Twelfth Night_.

T