With the Restoration came a better time for ballad-singing; but the old romantic ballad was almost dead, and though many of the ancient melodies remained, to them new ballads were set. Of these vast numbers poured from the press. The printed ballad which supplanted the traditional ballad was very poor in quality. It turned on some moral or religious topic; it satirised some fashion of the day; it recorded in jingling rhymes some fire, earthquake, flood, or other accident. Above all, it narrated the story of a murder. Now for the first time did the vulgar assassin stand forward as the hero of English poetry and romance. Many an old song or ballad was parodied. Thus the famous song of “The Hunt is up,” was converted into a political ballad in 1537; and a man named John Hogon was arrested for singing it. “An Old Woman Clothed in Grey” was the tune to which all England rang at the Restoration, with the words, “Let Oliver now be forgotten.” “Grim King of the Ghosts” was made use of for “The Protestants’ Joy,” a ballad on the coronation of King William and Queen Mary; and “Hey, then, up go we!” served, with parodied words against the Rump Parliament, as the “Tories’ Delight,” as an anti-Papal ballad, and even as a ballad on the great frost of the winter of 1683-4. The dissociation of the old tunes from the ballads that had given them their names, and to which they had been composed, did much to occasion the loss of our early ballads. Not only so, but with James I.’s reign there came in a fashion for recomposing the old themes in the new style; and the new editions caused the disappearance of the earlier ballad. There can be little doubt that the romantic and historic ballad, which has been happily preserved in Scotland, was common to all English-speaking people. These ballads are called Scottish, because they have been preserved in Scotland, but it is more than doubtful that they are of Scottish origin. Ballads travelled everywhere. We have in Thomas of Erceldoune’s “Sir Tristram,” an instance of a French metrical romance turned into a long poem in Scotland, in the thirteenth century. Many of the Scottish ballads have, as their base, myths or legends common to all the Norse people, and found in rhymes among them. At the beginning of this century, Mr. Davis Gilbert published a collection of Cornish Christmas Carols, and subjoined a couple of samples of the ballads sung by the Cornish people. One is “The Three Knights.” It begins-- “There did three knights come from the West, With the high and the lily oh! And these three knights courted one lady, And the rose was so sweetly blown.” This is precisely the ballad given by Herd and others as “The Cruel Brother.” One version in Scotland begins:-- “There was three ladies play’d at the ba’ With a hegh-ho! and lily gay; There came a knight and play’d o’er them a’, And the primrose spread so sweetly.” But another version sung in Scotland begins--