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Updated: May 18, 2025
The fiery and vindictive part assigned to him by Scott rests on the authority of the most amazing tissue of absurdities ever woven out of the inventive fancy of a ballad-monger. He had no kinsman's death to avenge, and he was too good a soldier to directly disobey his chief's orders, however little they may have been to his taste. There is, moreover, positive evidence to the contrary.
They returned to their masters, and so ended that Ill May day, which was the longer remembered because one Churchill, a ballad-monger in Saint Paul's Churchyard, indited a poem on it, wherein he swelled the number of prentices to two thousand, and of the victims to two hundred.
"?" pantomimed the other agents, with shrugged shoulders and helplessly outspread hands. And it happened too that Bakkus, the sweet ballad-monger, found himself on the same rocks of unemployment.
Was he not the idol of a select group who admired not only one another but also the satanism of Baudelaire, the hieratic obscenities of Beardsley, the mustiest Persian sage, the modernest American ballad-monger? He was full of gay irresponsibility.
Matilda Forey and her cousin Mary Branksburne wedded their voices, and songfully incited all young people to Haste to the bower that love has built, and defy the wise ones of the world; but the wise ones of the world were in a majority there, and very few places of assembly will be found where they are not; so the glowing appeal of the British ballad-monger passed into the bosom of the emptiness he addressed.
As to the rest, and compared with true and great poets, our Scottish Minstrel is but "a metre ballad-monger." We would rather have written one song of Burns, or a single passage in Lord Byron's Heaven and Earth, or one of Wordsworth's "fancies and good-nights," than all his epics.
Great, indeed, was the change which had come over that once proud spirit change surprising to all, but as natural as any other of the thousand changes which are produced in the progress of moments by the arch-magician, Love. Heretofore, her song had disdained the ordinary topics of the youthful ballad-monger.
For it was the habit of this eccentric earl, when refinements of the court began to pall upon him, or his absence from Whitehall became a necessity, to seek fresh adventure and intrigue disguised as a porter, a beggar, or a ballad-monger. And so carefully did he hide his identity in the character he assumed, that his most intimate friends failed to recognise his personality.
The other characters in "Whimzies" were an Almanac-maker, a Ballad-monger, a Decoy, an Exchange-man, a Forester, a Gamester, an Hospital-man, a Jailer, a Keeper, a Launderer, a Metal-man, a Neater, an Ostler, a Postmaster, a Quest-man, a Ruffian, a Sailor, a Traveller, an Under-Sheriff, a Wine-Soaker, a Xantippean, a Jealous Neighbour, a Zealous Brother.
"Not so. He is no scandalous liver, but he would fain stifle all the voices that call for better things. Ay, you look back at yon ballad-monger! Great folk despise the like of him, never guessing at the power there may be in such ribald stuff; while they would fain silence that which might turn men from their evil ways while yet there is time."
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