The reason why the broadside ballad was printed on one side only appears to be this—It was the practice to paste them on cottage walls, inside cupboard doors, chest lids, and such like places. There are many references in literature to this method of displaying the ballad, as for example— “I will now lead you to an honest ale-house where we shall find a cleanly room, lavender in the window, and twenty ballads stuck about the wall.”—Walton’s _Compleat Angler_, 1653. No wonder that the old angler and his pupil found so many delightful snatches of quaint old song current where ballads and songs were so fostered. The _Spectator_ shows that the usage had not died out in Queen Anne’s reign— “I cannot for my heart leave a room before I have thoroughly studied the walls of it, and examined the several printed papers which are usually pasted upon them.”—No. 85, vol. ii. Although the ballad was freely hawked about the streets of towns, and carried into the country by “flying stationers” and pedlars (witness Autolycus in the _Winter’s Tale_), yet the pastings upon walls and the constant foldings of loose ballad sheets soon destroyed existing copies, for few of the old ballad lovers were like Mr Pepys and Captain Cox. Laneham, it will be remembered, tells in his “Letter,” 1575, describing the festivities at Kenilworth Castle, that Cox’s ballads numbered more than a hundred, and were “all ancient,” and were “fair wrapt in parchment, and tied with a whip cord.” Would there had been more of the Captain’s careful disposition. Broadside ballads must have come among the people with the first dawn of printing, and in Henry the Eighth’s reign they had become of such weight in political influence that one or more royal edicts were levied against them. The earliest known English printed ballad is, in date, about 1540. Ballad printing was generally done by small local printers, or else by those larger London printers who made a speciality of the work, and who supplied the whole country with ballads and with “garlands.” Gough, Redman, Bankes, Walley, and many others who worked in London during the sixteenth century were noted printers of ballads. In the seventeenth century ballad printing became more general, and many of the publishers clubbed together, so that we find several names on one imprint. Henry Gosson printed in 1616, and John Trundle, his contemporary, was so noted as a ballad vendor that he is named in Ben Jonson’s play, “Every Man in His Humour.” In 1642 Francis Coles (or Coules) flourished and issued ballads in conjunction with William Gilbertson, having a shop on Saffron Hill. Of this period also were Alexander Milbourn, Francis Grove, J. Wright, William Onley, and the “Assignees of Thomas Symcocke.” At a later date William Thackeray, at the “Angel in Duck Lane,” issued, with Passenger, at the “Three Bibles on London Bridge,” many interesting ballads, garlands, and chap-books. One of their dates is 1687.