Page:The cavalier songs and ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 (IA cavaliersongsbal00mack).pdf/8

of the kind, for they procure it from the more readily available and more copious if not more reliable, source of the daily and weekly press. The song and ballad have ceased to deal with public affairs. No new ones of the kind are made except as miserable parodies and burlesques that may amuse sober costermongers and half-drunken men about town, who frequent music saloons at midnight, but which are offensive to every one else. Such genuine old ballads as remain in the popular memory are either fast dying out, or relate exclusively to the never-to-be-superseded topics of love, war, and wine. The people of our day have little heart or appreciation for song, except in Scotland and Ireland. England and America are too prosaic and too busy, and the masses, notwithstanding all their supposed advantages in education, are much too vulgar to delight in either song or ballad that rises to the dignity of poetry. They appreciate the buffooneries of the “Negro Minstrelsy,” and the inanities and the vapidities of sentimental love songs, but the elegance of such writers as Thomas Moore, and the force of such vigorous thinkers and tender lyrists as Robert Burns, are above their sphere, and are left to scholars in their closets and ladies in their drawing-rooms. The case was different among our ances-