“When Flora, with her fragrant flowers, Bedeckt the earth so firm and gay, And Neptune, with his dainty showers, Came to present the month of May, “King Henry would a progress ride; Over the river Thames past he, Upon a mountain top also Did walk, some pleasure for to see.” The first is a recomposition of the earlier ballad in the reign of James I. It makes a historical blunder. It supposes that Lord Charles Howard, who was not born till twenty-five years after the death of Andrew Barton, was sent against the pirate. The memory of the admiral who served against the Armada had eclipsed the fame of the earlier high admiral. The fact of this historic error existing in the ballad marks it as a late composition. The second ballad is a still later recast, probably of the reign of Charles II. These two later versions would be all that we have, had not the popular memory held to the earliest and original ballad--because associated with a remarkably fine melody. Unhappily, it has retained but a few of the stanzas. The Robin Hood ballads most fortunately escaped remodelling, and they retain the fresh character of the ancient ballad. Ravenscroft preserved some ballads in his “Deuteromelia,” 1609. One begins:-- “Yonder comes a courteous knight Lustily raking over the lay. He was full ’ware of a bonny lasse, As she came wandering over the way. Then she sang, downe a down a down, Hey down derry.” Another is “John Dory”:-- “As it fell on a hole day And upon a hole tide, John Dory bought him an ambling nag, Ambling nag to Paris for to ride.” Another:-- “Who liveth so merry in all the land As doth the poor widow that selleth sand, And ever she singeth as I can guess, Will you buy my sand, my sand, mistress?” Also:-- “The Flye she sat in the shamble row, And shambled with her heels, I trow, And then came Sir Cranion With legs so long and many a one.” A few--but only a few, unspoiled ballads have found their way into print in broadsides. Such are, “The Baffled Knight,” “The Knight and the Shepherd’s Daughter,” “Lord Thomas and the fair Eleanor,” “Barbara Allen,” “The Bailiff’s Daughter of Islington,” “The Brown Girl.” They are miserably few, but they are all that remain to us of the ballad poetry of England, except what has been preserved to us by the Scotch, who knew better than ourselves what was good, and had a finer poetic sense. [Illustration: _Fig. 39._--WOMAN AT HER SPINNING WHEEL, FROM A BROADSIDE.]