He found him at 15 (now 14 1/2) Patrick Street, on a straw bed, in a room full of ragged ballad-singers come to cheer his last moments.

As to the rest, and compared with true and great poets, our Scottish Minstrel is but "a metre ballad-monger."

In the reigns of James the First and his successor, the taste of the people for nature and simplicity kept up the profession of ballad-singing.

It is rather odd how obstinately life clings to the most hackneyed trick of ballad-makers; and still naively pretends to enrich her productions by the stale device of introducing a refrainso that the idlest remarks of as much as three years ago keep cropping up as the actual gist of the present!...

And it was not only in the abundance of matter that the circumstances of the infant Colony were favourable to ballad-making.

Some of the ballads picture love more fortunate in the most charming manner, and the dark tortures of jealousy are powerfully described in others.

Swift contracted for the humourous songs: Gay who had, as Goldsmith says, "a happy strain of ballad-thinking," was set down for the pathetic ones; and those of a miscellaneous character were divided amongst a number of amateur bards.

Here files of ballads dangle from dead walls; Advertisements, of giant-size, from high Press forward, in all colours, on the sight; 195 These, bold in conscious merit, lower down; That, fronted with a most imposing word, Is, peradventure, one in masquerade.

In a corner Pierre Lefranc, pamphleteer and ballad-writer, but a pamphleteer like Courier, and a ballad-writer like Béranger smiled at the grave and stern words of Dupont de Bussac.

How when the luscious melancholy of their morbid self-consciousness began to pall on the appetite, they fled for refuge as suddenly to mere poetry of description and action, to Southey, Scott, the ballad-literature of all ages?

The music of 'Fortune my Foe,' is given in Mr. Chappell's 'Popular Music of the Olden Time'; and the words may be seen in the 'Bayford Ballads' (edited by Mr. Ebsworth, our greatest master of ballad-lore).