Although a few favorite ballads such as "Johnnie Armstrong," "Chevy Chase," "The Children in the Wood," and some of the Robin Hood ones had long been widely, nay almost universally familiar, they had hardly been regarded as literature worthy of serious attention. They were looked upon as nursery tales, or at best as the amusement of peasants and unlettered folk, who used to paste them up on the walls of inns, cottages, and ale-houses. Here and there an educated man had had a sneaking fondness for collecting old ballads--much as people nowadays collect postage stamps. Samuel Pepys, the diarist, made such a collection, and so did John Selden, the great legal antiquary and scholar of Milton's time. "I have heard," wrote Addison, "that the late Lord Dorset, who had the greatest wit tempered with the greatest candor, and was one of the finest critics as well as the best poets of his age, had a numerous collection of old English ballads, and a particular pleasure in the reading of them. I can affirm the same of Mr. Dryden." Dryden's "Miscellany Poems" (1684) gave "Gilderoy," "Johnnie Armstrong," "Chevy Chase," "The Miller and the King's Daughter," and "Little Musgrave and the Lady Barnard." The last named, as well as "Lady Anne Bothwell's Lament" and "Fair Margaret and Sweet William,"[34] was quoted in Beaumont and Fletcher's "Knight of the Burning Pestle," (1611). Scraps of them are sung by one of the _dramatis personae_, old Merrythought, whose speciality is a damnable iteration of ballad fragments. References to old ballads are numerous in the Elizabethan plays. Percy devoted the second book of his first series to "Ballads that Illustrate Shakspere." In the seventeenth century a few ballads were printed entire in poetic miscellanies entitled "Garlands," higgledy-piggledy with pieces of all kinds. Professor Child enumerates nine ballad collections before Percy's. The only ones of any importance among these were "A Collection of Old Ballads" (Vols I. and II. in 1723, Vol III. In 1725), ascribed to Ambrose Philips; and the Scotch poet, Allan Ramsay's, "Tea Table Miscellany," (in 4 vols., 1714-40) and "Evergreen" (2 vols., 1724). The first of these collections was illustrated with copperplate engravings and supplied with introductions which were humorous in intention. The editor treated his ballads as trifles, though he described them as "corrected from the best and most ancient copies extant"; and said that Homer himself was nothing more than a blind ballad-singer, whose songs had been subsequently joined together and formed into an epic poem. Ramsay's ballads were taken in part from a manuscript collection of some eight hundred pages, made by George Bannatyne about 1570 and still preserved in the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh.