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SONGS AND BALLADS |
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1511, and is recorded by John Lesley, Bishop of Ross, in his Chronicle. The details embody popular tradition rather than facts. The version of the ballad printed here is a sixteenth century version preserved in Bishop Percy's MS. It was partially rewritten and adorned with various rhetorical additions by some seventeenth century writer. This late version, which begins,
' When Flora with her fragrant flowers Bedeckt the earth so trim and gay,'
is reprinted in Stone's Sea Songs and Ballads (p. 64), where there may also be found a still later echo of the original ballad, entitled Henry Marten (p. 72).
These few ballads and poems comprise all the verse literature in existence touching the naval history of the period which preceded the accession of Elizabeth. With her reign the literature of the subject at once assumes considerable proportions. Mr. Julian Corbett goes too far when he says ' It is one of the remarkable features of the Elizabethan age that its higher literature displays hardly a trace of having been influenced by the exploits of the seamen.' [Drake and the Tudor Navy, ii. 44.) On the contrary Professor Raleigh shows conclusively, in his introduction to the recent reprint of Hakluyt, the extent to which the voyages and discoveries of that time influenced the imagination of contemporary poets. Writers by profession, whether they wrote for a learned audience or the people, began to discover that the character of the great seamen of the time furnished a popular topic for panegyric, and to celebrate their deeds in verse. William Warner inserted in his Albion s England a spirited description of the fight with the Armada, and a passage in praise of 'world-admired Drake,' 'his brave breeder Hawkins'and others of less note. |
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