Ballads, street songs, and broadsides, belonging to a wide and usually comparatively uncultured level, in all ethnic communities, deal largely with physiological and scatological functions, sexual and erotic intrusions and experiences and experiments, without restraint, without reflection and without moralizing corollaries thereon, but with a forthright, direct verbal impact. Hence there are, dispersed through such unsophisticated uncontrived versified episodes, many matters relating to amatory enticements and means of erotic provocations and challenges affecting both male and female, in all types of occupation, in many gradations of society, at every age level, from young and urgent milkmaids and their swains to debauched lechers and libertines. Pastoral pieces, soldiers’ rollicking ditties, sailors’ chanties, all the rhythmic, chthonic, usually crude but outspoken exuberance of folk ways and currents, of peasantry and burgher, tinker and servant, tipplers, ploughmen, and innkeepers—that is the colorful and various component of the popular muse. Sometimes the erotic impact is suggested by indirection: sometimes by an innocuous expression used in a double entendre context. Sometimes the idiom has the immediacy of the Greek functional and genital significance exemplified in the Aristophanic comedies. Rakes and panders rub shoulders with guileless innocence and feminine wiles, with lordly arrogance, authority, and wealth, with humility and beggarliness, with want and starvation. And pervasive through all the insinuating permutations of street life and market place, of court and manor, of fields and ocean, battle and stress, there runs the urgency of amatory attraction: lust and passion and allurement, and the means of satisfying and sating and continuing and maintaining such erotic capacities, such animal lustfulness and unbridled salaciousness and lewd ardor, prurience and perverted depravities. Yet there are instances, sudden outbursts, occasional spurts of deeper feelings, brusque awareness: some latent though possibly dishonored principle, a touch of wry humor, in which blatant reality and some remote consciousness of betterment peer through the vernacular crudities. In one collection of such ballads, entitled _Drolleries_, the amatory theme returns again and again, always lusty, always sensual. The burgess who is off to the fair while her good man is absent from home: the coy mistress: the country maid on a visit to the City: the old lecherous beau unrepentantly persistent: the lustful squire, the libidinous courtier, the wayward maid: widows and lords, fiddlers and coopers, cobblers and miners, merchants all conniving in adultery and incest, in concocting potions for reluctant lovers, in beseeching hesitant favors, in besmirching marriage and domesticity and exultantly and indifferently glorifying all the varieties of amatory diversions and perversions. * * * * *