“I beseeche you humbly of your blessing: also, modyr, I beseeche you that ther may be purveyed some meane that I myth have sent me home by the same messenger that shall bring my Aunt Poynings answer--two paire hose--1 payr blak and another russet, whyche be redy for me at the hosers with the crooked back next to the Blk Friars gate, within Ludgate. John Pampyng knoweth him well eno’. And if the blk hose be paid for, he will send me the russet ones unpaid for. I beseeche you that this geer be not forgot, for I have not an whole hose to do on. I pray you visit the Rood of St. Pauls, and St. Savior at Barmonsey whyls ye abide in London, and let my sister Margery go with you to pray to them that she may have a good husband ere she come home again. Written at Norwich on holyrood day, by yr “Son and lowly Servant “JNO: PASTON THE YOUNGEST.” This sounds as home-like as if it were written yesterday, and about one of us--even to the sending of two pair of hose if one was paid for. And yet this familiar, boy-like letter was written in the year 1465: six years before Caxton had set up his press in Westminster--twenty-seven before Columbus had landed on San Salvador, and at a time when Louis XI. and barber Oliver (whose characters are set forth in Scott’s story of Quentin Durward) were hanging men who angered them on the branches of the trees which grew around the dismal palace of Plessis-les-Tours, in France. _A Burst of Balladry._ I have brought my readers through a waste literary country to-day; but we cannot reach the oases of bloom without going across the desert spaces. In looking back upon this moil and turmoil--this fret and wear and barrenness of the fifteenth century, in which we have welcomed talk about Caxton’s sorry translations, and the wheezing of his press; and have given an ear to the hunting discourse of Dame Juliana, for want of better things; and have dwelt with a certain gleesomeness on the homely Paston Letters, let us not forget that there has been all the while, and running through all the years of stagnation, a bright thread of balladry, with glitter and with gayety of color. This ballad music--whose first burst we can no more pin to a date than we can the first singing of the birds--had lightened, in that early century, the walk of the wayfarer on all the paths of England; it had spun its tales by bivouac fires in France; it had caught--as in silken meshes--all the young foragers on the ways of Romance. To this epoch, of which we have talked, belongs most likely that brave ballad of Chevy Chase, which keeps alive the memory of Otterbourne, and of that woful hunting which “Once there did, in Chevy Chase befal. “To drive the deare with hounde and horne Erle Percy took his way; The child may rue, that is unborn The hunting of that day.”