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Excerpt from An Elizabethan Garland: Being a Descriptive Catalogue of Seventy Black-Letter Ballads, Printed Between the Years 1550 and 1597
We delight in a Fiddler's Fling full of mirth and pastime! And revel in the exhilarating perfume of those odoriferous' chaplets gathered on sunshiny holidays and star-twinkling nights bewail ing how beautiful maidens meet. With faithless wooers, and how fond shepherds are jilted by deceitful damsels. How despairing Corydons hang, and how desponding Phillidas drown themselves. How ghosts haunt and in¿ict vengeance. How disappointed lovers go to sea, and how forlorn lasses follow them in jackets and trousers! Sir George Etheridge, in his comedy of Love in a Tub, says, Expect at night to see the old man with his paper lantern and crack'd spectacles, singing you woeful tragedies to kitchen-maids, and cobblers' apprentices. Aubrey mentions that his nurse could repeat the history of England, from the Conquest to the time of Charles I. In ballads. In Walton's Angler, Piscator having caught a chub, conducts Venator to an honest alehouse where they would find a cleanly room, lavender in the windows, and twenty ballads stuck about the wall. When I travelled, says The Spectator, I took a particular delight in hearing the songs and fables that are come from father to son, and are most in vogue among the common people of the countries through which I passed.
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