In 1653, Dorothy Osborne tells Sir William Temple that she has received from her brother a ballad “much older than my ‘Lord of Lorne,’ and she sends it on to him.” Would that she had told us more about it. And then she writes, “The heat of the day is spent in reading or working, and about six or seven o’clock I walk out into a common that lies hard by the house, where a great many young wenches keep sheep and cows, and sit in the shade singing of ballads. I go to them and compare their voices and beauties to some ancient shepherdesses that I have read of, and find a vast difference there; but, trust me, I think these are as innocent as those could be. I talk to them, and find they want nothing to make them the happiest people in the world but the knowledge that they are so.” Walton in his “Complete Angler,” printed in the very same year in which Dorothy Osborne wrote to her lover of the singing peasant girls, says: “I entered into the next field, and a second pleasure entertained me: ’twas a handsome milk-maid, that had cast away all care, and sung like a nightingale; her voice was good, and the ditty fitted for it; ’twas that smooth song which was made by Kit Marlow, now at least fifty years ago; and the milk-maid’s mother sung an answer to it, which was made by Sir Walter Raleigh in his younger dayes.” We know what the song was, “Come, live with me and be my love.” The mother says to Walton, “If you will but speak the word, I will make you a good sillabub, and then you may sit down in a hay-cock and eat it, and Maudlin shall sit by and sing you the good old song of the Hunting in Chevy Chase, or some other good ballad, for she hath good store of them: Maudlin hath a notable memory.” But ballad-singing was not confined to milk-maids and clowns, for Walton proposes to spend a pleasant evening with his brother, Peter, and his friends, “to tell tales, or sing ballads, or make a catch, or find some harmless sport to content us.” It is a somewhat sad fact--fact it is, that the ballad is at its last gasp among us. It has gone through several phases, and it has now reached the last, when it disappears altogether. The ballad was anciently a story set to music, and music to which the feet could move in dance. The _ballet_ is the dance to which the _ballad_ was sung. It was not always danced to, but it always could be danced to. It was of great length, but not too long for light hearts or light feet on a threshing-floor. The ballad was accommodated to the exigencies of the dance, by being given a burden, or _bourdon_, a drone that was sung by the young men, when no bagpipe was there. This burden appears in numerous ballads, and has usually no reference to the story told by the singers, and when printed is set in italics. In the scene in the “Winter’s Tale,” already quoted, the servant alludes to these burdens, “He has the prettiest love-songs for maids--with such delicate burdens of ‘dildos and fadings.’” Thus:--