the memorable period of the struggle for liberty that commenced in the reign of Charles I. The Puritans had the pulpit on their side, and found it a powerful instrument. The Cavaliers had the song writers on theirs, and found them equally effective. And the song and ballad writers of that day were not always illiterate versifiers. Some of them were the choicest wits and most accomplished gentlemen of the nation. As they could not reach the ears of their countrymen by the printed book, the pamphlet, or the newspaper, nor mount the pulpit and dispute with Puritanism on its own ground and in its own precincts, they found the song, the ballad, and the epigram more available among a musical and song-loving people such as the English then were, and trusted to these to keep up the spirit of loyalty in the evil days of the royal cause, to teach courage in adversity, and cheerfulness in all circumstances, and to ridicule the hypocrites whom they could not shame, and the tyrants whom they could not overthrow. Though many thousands of these have been preserved in the King’s Pamphlets in the British Museum, and in other collections which have been freely ransacked for the materials of the following pages, as many thousands more have undoubtedly perished. Originally printed as broadsides, and sold for a halfpenny at country fairs, it used to be the fashion of the peasantry to paste them up in cupboards, or on the backs of doors, and farmers’ wives, as well as servant girls and farm labourers, who were able to read, would often paste them on the lids of their trunks, as the best means of preserving them. This is one reason why so many of them have been lost without recovery. To Sir W. C. Trevelyan literature is indebted for the restoration of a few of these waifs and strays, which he found pasted in an old trunk of the days of Cromwell, and which he carefully detached and presented to the British Museum. But a sufficient number of these flying leaves of satire, sentiment, and loyalty have reached our time, to throw a curious and instructive light upon the feelings of the men who resisted the progress of the English Revolution; and who made loyalty to the person of the monarch, even when the monarch was wrong, the first of the civic virtues. In the superabundance of the materials at command, as will be seen from the appended list of books and MSS. which have been consulted and drawn upon to form this collection, the difficulty was to keep within bounds, and to select only such specimens as merited a place in a volume necessarily limited, by their celebrity, their wit, their beauty, their historical interest, or the light they might happen to throw on the obscure biography of the most remarkable actors in the scenes which they describe. It would be too much to claim for these ballads the exalted title of poetry. They are not poetical in the highest sense of the word, and possibly would not have been so effective