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SONGS AND BALLADS |
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Another on the Robin Hood privateer concludes defiantly:
' My name is George Cook, the author of this, And he may be hang'd that will take it amiss.'
A third, which narrates the escape of the Princess Royal from being wrecked on the Goodwin Sands, ends by suggesting that the poet should be rewarded for his pains :
' It was a brisk young sailor that these lines did make, And over a can of flip his heart would never ache.'
(Pp. 290, 267, 191.)
There are many other ballads in which it is obvious that the writer was personally concerned in the incidents which form the subject of his verses, although no explicit avowal is actually made.
Finally there is yet a third class of ballads, neither written by professional ballad-writers, nor by sailors themselves, but by professional men of letters. The popularity of the ballad induced writers to adopt that form of composition in order to catch the ear of the multitude. Hence a considerable number of. satirical compositions cast in that mould, such as the verses against Torrington and Byng, given on pp. 110, 206 of this volume, and other pieces written with a direct political purpose. The typical specimen of this class of ballad is Hosiers Ghost, by Richard Glover, a professional poet who had already published a blank verse epic, and treated this subject in the fashion most likely to appeal to the multitude in order to secure their support for the attack on Walpole's foreign policy. Other professional authors, too, without any political object to serve, adopted the same form because they perceived that the sailor was a popular topic, and that his perils, his loves and his diversions, afforded |
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