To pass to a very different hero of the hour, Jean Paul Marat. From the volumes of incoherent eulogy which followed his death one passage may serve as a specimen of the whole. It occurs in a funeral oration by the citizen Morel.

'A patriotic orator,' says he, has compared Marat with the Son of Mary, a comparison which is in every respect most just. Like Jesus, Marat loved the people and none but the people. Like Jesus, Marat hated Kings, Nobles, Priests, and the wealthy merchants; and like Jesus he never rested from his combat with these pests of society. Like Jesus he brimmed over with sensibility and humanity; he may in truth be said to have possessed the sublime spirit of Rousseau. Like Jesus, Marat, after giving his life for the people, would have died for them on the scaffold had the people of France been as vile and stupid as were the Jews.'

Eighteen months later, when Marat's corpse had been removed from the Panthéon and thrown into the main sewer, a sequel to this and to other comparisons between Christ and Marat was published by a writer who sets himself to prove that both alike were knaves, impostors and enemies of the human race.

Here we must close. We have but touched the fringe of a vast subject in an endeavour to show how great is the interest, and how great the value, of the Croker Collection. The final history of the Revolution has not yet been written, nor can it be completely written for a long time to come. We are still living and acting under its influence. Whether that influence has been for good or for evil is a question which cannot be lightly asked or glibly answered. It is the enigma which the present century will be called upon to solve.

G. K. FORTESCUE.

Art. 4.-AUTOLYCUS' PACK: THE BALLAD JOURNALISM OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.

1. Catalogue of the Fifty Manuscripts and Printed Books bequeathed to the British Museum by Alfred H. Huth. Printed for the Trustees. 1912.

2. Ancient Ballads and Broadsides published in England in the Sixteenth Century, chiefly in the earlier years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Reprinted from the unique original copies, mostly in the Black Letter, preserved in the library of Henry Huth, Esq. [Philobiblon Society.] London: Whittingham, 1867.

3. Ballads and Broadsides, chiefly of the Elizabethan Period.. .. now in the Library at Britwell Court, Buckinghamshire. Oxford: printed for presentation to the members of the Roxburghe Club, 1912.

4. Catalogue of a Collection of Printed Broadsides in the possession of the Society of Antiquaries. Compiled by Robert Lemon, Esq., F.S.A. Published by the Society of Antiquaries of London, 1866.

THE girl sitting opposite me in my suburban train of a morning, gravely studying her halfpenny illustrated daily paper, has perhaps not read 'The Winter's Tale at least since she left school; and, if she were to read it, would not recognise herself in Mopsa, who 'loves a ballad in print, for then we are sure it is true,' nor her favourite paper as the direct descendant and representative of the ballads with which Autolycus' pack was so richly furnished. Yet this is the egg from which that full-fledged and loudvoiced bird, our modern journalism, has been hatched.

The first English periodicals were the newly-discovered series of 'Courants' printed at Amsterdam in 1620-21. A predecessor to these, dated 1588 and reporting the defeat of the Armada, was ingeniously forged by the Earl of Hardwicke in 1743-4 in the form of three numbers ('50,' '51' and '54') of 'The English Mercurie. Published by Authoritie, for the Prevention of false Reportes.' This, no doubt, he found much more amusing than the large history of the Armada which he gave up for it. He planned his forgery well, but it was very imperfectly executed; and, after a much longer success than it deserved,

it at last met the eye of a bibliographer, Thomas Watts, of the British Museum Library, who promptly exposed it.

No doubt, before these regular-in dates of appearance often irregular-journals, there was a mass of catchpenny news-quartos; many of these bear title-pages of the most full-blooded and sensational kind, often so lengthy as to render the reading of the book itself quite unnecessary, even if one had any temptation to do so. Examples from the library of Worcester College, Oxford, catalogued in a little book printed by Canon Daniel at his private press, show plainly that the deviser of headlines and placards is not the son of later times, but an old and grey-headed disturber of the public peace. Earlier than these again, earliest of all, the first answer of the printing-press, at least in England, to that natural and universal desire of humanity to hear some new thing and then to tell it to someone else, was the ballad or ballet.' By this name we, of course, do not mean the 'ballads' commonly socalled-that large and far more celebrated class of poems, the dramatic ballads of the Scottish border and elsewhere, first restored to favour by Percy, and now collected in Prof. Child's monumental volumes. Poems like' Binnorie' or 'Lord Rendal' seem never to have been printed till comparatively recent times.* Perhaps they flourished most at a distance from the great cities; perhaps their singers, the wandering minstrels, kept them locked jealously in their own memories. Nor are we to speak of the duller narrative ballads, that arose about 1590, it seems, and flourished throughout the seventeenth century, such as Patient Grissell or The Merchant's Daughter of Bristow. These are far commoner, and abound in the Roxburghe, Haigh Hall, Pepys and similar collections.

The sixteenth century ballet' was different from either of these and, as has already been suggested, was mainly topical and inspired by current events of more or less public interest. Of these, about two hundred, out of the multitude that the Register of the Stationers' Company shows to have been poured forth by the Elizabethan presses, are known to exist to-day-all but two or three in single copies. About a third of these scanty survivors are now and have long been in safe

* 'Chevy Chase' was printed as a chap book in the 17th century.

keeping in the library of the Society of Antiquaries at Burlington House. The remaining two-thirds have had a curious history. They were first heard of early in the nineteenth century, as a loose bundle in a sheep-skin wrapper, in the hands of the housekeeper at Helmingham Hall in Suffolk, who sold or gave them (with an absolute right to do so as far as any evidence goes, though it has been needlessly doubted) to a Mr Fitch, postmaster at Ipswich. He knew something of their value, and sold them either to a dealer or direct to George Daniel of Canonbury, who, it is believed, gave the then fair price of 501. for them. Later in his life Daniel, perhaps following the practice of wise collectors whose funds are not unlimited, of selling or exchanging earlier acquisitions as their tastes alter, disposed of about half of his ballads to Thorpe, the dealer in Shakespeariana. Thorpe, who was the Bernard Quaritch of his day, and knew the tastes of all the collectors and was trusted by them, wrote to the omnivorous Richard Heber about his purchase, with the result that he sold it to him for 2007. Heber's enormous collection of books, filling no fewer than eight houses, instead of being left to the nation, was dispersed at a series of sales in 1834-5; and the ballads, except a few based on classical authors which are now lost, passed with much else into the library at Britwell Court, then being formed by Mr W. H. Miller, who, from his passion for the margin and condition of his books, was nicknamed 'Measure Miller.' There they have remained, a treasure among treasures; and a reprint of them was presented last year by their owner, Mr Sydney Christie Miller, to the members of the Roxburghe Club.

There is such a thing as parentage in libraries; and, while the Britwell collection is the child of the 'Bibliotheca Heberiana,' the Daniel library gave birth to the Huth. The one half of Daniel's 'sleeping beauties'-as Heber called them-having been sold, as we have seen, to Thorpe, the other half remained with Daniel till his death in 1864. They were then secured by Mr Henry Huth for the then remarkably high price of 750l., to which Miller probably ran him up with the intention

* They were well catalogued for the Society by Robert Lemon so long ago as 1866, but they still await reprinting.

of reuniting what had been put asunder; and in Huth's library and that of his son they remained till last year, when the latter, crowning his and his father's long tradition of generosity, bequeathed to the British Museum its choice of any fifty of his books, and this volume passed into the national library as one of them.*

So much for the vicissitudes of these waifs of literature on their way to their final home; it is of more consequence to understand what they are and what sort of men produced them. These poems vary greatly, but one point nearly all had in common. The name ballet' may remind us that they were intended to be sung-as the Clown put it, 'a very pleasant thing and sung lamentably.' Often no doubt the wandering pedlar sang them himself; but that would not be so much to earn pence, like the minstrels, as by singing to show the quality of his wares. Occasionally the printed broadside bears the music; but more often the words were written to some familiar air, such as 'Row well, ye mariners,' 'The Black Almaine,' or someone or other's 'Galliard.' Sometimes the words are appropriate to the sprightly Galliard music, and the 'ballet' is in fact a dance. Take this, of 1569:

* In 1867 Henry Huth presented a reprint of them to the Philobiblon Society; this was reprinted by Joseph Lilly in the same year. Many of the quotations below are from the latter.

+ Brall, a dance.

Tryxt, trickest, i.e. neatest.

·

§ Harde, heard. Wiffler, whiffler, a wand-bearing official at solemnities.