A large proportion of the black-letter ballads were of moral and religious import. In Beaumont and Fletcher’s “The Coxcomb,” the tinker refers to these, when he finds poor Viola wandering in the streets at night, and listens to her doleful words. He says:-- “What’s this? a prayer or a homily, or a ballad of good counsel?” If we compare the black-letter issues of the sixteenth century with the snatches of ballads that come to us through the playwrights, we find that they do not wholly agree. The dramatists made their characters sing the folk-ballads, the same that are described in “A Defence for Milksmaydes” in 1563. “They rise in the morning to hear the larke sing, And welcome with balletts the somer’s coming. * * * * * In going to milking, or coming away, They sing merry balletts, or storeys they say. Their mouth is as pure and as white as their milk; --You can not say that of your velvett and silke.” So the mad jailor’s daughter in Fletcher’s and Shakespeare’s “The Two Noble Kinsmen.” She says: “Is not this a fine song?” _Brother_: “Oh, a very fine one!” _Daughter_: “I can say twenty more, I can sing _The Broom_ and _Bonny Robin_.” And she begins to troll “Oh fair! oh sweet!” etc. Unhappily the authors of this play did not write out the song, as it was too well known to require transcription, and now it is lost. So also are those she sings in another scene. “The George alow came from the South, From the Coast of Barbary-a! And there we met with brave gallants of war, By one, by two, by three-a! “Well hail’d, well hail’d, you jolly gallants! And whither now are you bound-a? Or let me have your company Till I come to the Sound-a!” This sounds as though a part of the “Henry Martyn” (Andrew Barton) already given. Another of the mad girl’s songs is:-- “There were three fools fell out about an howlet. The one said ’twas an owl; The other said nay. The third he said it was a hawk, And her bells were cut away.” So also with some of the songs and ballads of Ophelia. They were too well known to be printed, and now they are irrecoverably gone. We have lost nearly the whole of our earliest ballad poetry, and only a tithe of that which took its place has come down to us. “Our earliest ballads,” says the editor of Percy’s folio, “though highly popular in the Elizabethan age, were yet never collected into any collections, save in Garlands, till the year 1723. They wandered up and down the country without even sheepskins or goatskins to protect them; they flew about like the birds of the air, and sung songs dear to the hearts of the common people--songs whose power was sometimes confessed by the higher classes, but not so thoroughly appreciated as to conduce them to exert themselves for their preservation.”