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Updated: June 6, 2025
They are full of controversy, and every one of a several judgment concerning the business under present consideration, whether it be mountebank, show, hanging, or ballad-singer.
Among the many incidents related as illustrative of Goldsmith's vanity and envy is one which occurred one evening when he was in a drawing-room with a party of ladies, and a ballad-singer under the window struck up his favorite song of Sally Salisbury. "How miserably this woman sings!" exclaimed he. "Pray, doctor," said the lady of the house, "could you do it better?"
All was quiet, and the voice of the street ballad-singer sounded full and clear in the stillness. Sir Oswald Eversleigh was in no humour to listen to street-singers. It must needs be some voice very far removed from common voices which could awaken him from his gloomy abstraction.
These have all a certain amount of magnificence in their tastes; but there are others again whose priceless collections are like the stock-in-trade of a wholesale ballad-singer, consisting of chap-books, as they are termed the articles dealt in by pedlars and semi-mendicants for the past century or two.
It was a female, dressed in a fanciful, pastoral garb, suited to the character she was sustaining; but her countenance was not to be mistaken. It was the same ballad-singer that had twice crossed her path, and given her mysterious intimations of the lurking mischief that surrounded her.
'Do you hear that ballad-singer in the square? A voice clear and shrill seemed to float to us in the darkness: 'Sweet and low, sweet and low, wind of the western sea, she sang. The waves seemed to splash in harmonious accompaniment; the lights were flickering, the carriages rolling under the faint starlight. I saw Giles's face as I loved to see it grave, thoughtful, and satisfied.
Henceforth the vagrant ballad-singer, as he might be thought, was submitted, to his surprise, to a sort of literary canonization, and was invested with the office of forming the young mind of Greece to noble thoughts and bold deeds. To be read in Homer soon became the education of a gentleman; and a rule, recognized in her free age, remained as a tradition even in the times of her degradation.
"I tell you, man, Lady Eversleigh is a consummate actress, though she never acted before a better audience than the clodhoppers at a country fair. Do you know who my lady was when Sir Oswald picked her out of the gutter? If you don't, I'll enlighten you. She was a street ballad-singer, whom the baronet found one night starving in the market-place of a country town.
In front of a public-house a ballad-singer was singing a song in the middle of a crowd of people. As far as I could hear it, the words ran like this: As we came down from Wicklow With our bundle of switches As we came down from Wicklow, Oh! what did we see? As we came to the city We saw maidens pretty, And we called out to ask them to buy our heath-broom.
At the villages where the burchiello touched for refreshments, handsome young women in scarlet bodices came on board with baskets of melons, grapes, figs and peaches; and under the trellises on the landings, lads and girls with flowers in their hair were dancing the monferrina to the rattle of tambourines or the chant of some wandering ballad-singer.
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