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Updated: May 28, 2025
Ironically, the first professional entertainers to perform in minstrel shows were whites who were imitating plantation slave productions. In the beginning, whites performed in blackface, and, only later, did Negroes themselves perform commercially. The spirituals were a religious manifestation of the Afro-American heritage.
The song had been composed by the poet attached to his house; it was graven in the stone of the second rock-room of the tomb, and Neferhotep had left a plot of ground in trust to the Necropolis, with the charge of administering its revenues for the payment of a minstrel, who every-year at the feast of the dead should sing the monody to the accompaniment of his lute.
After he had turned the corner of the street, as above mentioned, Bobby trotted on for a short space, and then, coming to a full stop, executed a few steps of the minstrel dance, at the end of which he brought his foot down with tremendous emphasis on the pavement, and said "Yes, I've bin an' done it. I know'd I was game for a good deal, but I did not think I was up to that.
"It would be hard," replied the minstrel bluntly, "to answer such a question in the affirmative; and yet, when you consider how nearly allied is his profession who celebrates deeds of arms with that of the knight who performs them, your honour, I think, will hold it advisable that a minstrel desirous of doing his devoir, should, like a young knight, seek the truth of adventures where it is to be found, and rather visit countries where the knowledge is preserved of high and noble deeds, than those lazy and quiet realms, in which men live indolently, and die ignobly in peace, or by sentence of law.
"Is it to these gentlemen that your censure applies?" answered the minstrel; "I should have judged differently, having never, in the course of my experience, seen a young man more courteous and amiable than the young knight you named."
"It's a bargain!" and homeward rode the man in armour, clanking and clashing, and in his hoarse voice making vague shouts after bits of the carol that still haunted him, wondering meanwhile if the minstrel really would come. He need not have wondered. Had not that minstrel wandered half over Germany expressly to sing under those walls?
If this be other than the Lord of Utterbol, he will see our let-pass and let us alone; or if it be he indeed, what harm shall he do to the bearers of his own pass? But the minstrel still stared wild and trembled; then he stammered out: "I thought I should bring thee to Utterness first, and that some other should lead thee thence, I did not look to see him. I dare not, I dare not! O look, look!"
The minstrel was so much astonished at this change of deportment, from the sensitive acuteness of agony which attended the beginning of his narrative, that he stepped back two paces, and gazing on the Constable with wonder, mixed with admiration, exclaimed, "We have heard of martyrs in. Palestine, but this exceeds them!"
Then came forth a man of the kin of the Shieldings of the Upper-mark, and clomb the mound; and he spake in rhyme from beginning to end; for he was a minstrel of renown: "Lo I am a man of the Shieldings and Geirmund is my name; A half-moon back from the wild-wood out into the hills I came, And I went alone in my war-gear; for we have affinity With the Hundings of the Fell-folk, and with them I fain would be; For I loved a maid of their kindred.
Lord Macaulay, who had a phenomenal memory, said that if all the copies of Milton's Paradise Lost were to be destroyed, he could reproduce the book complete, from memory. In early life he was a great admirer of Walter Scott's poetry, and especially the "Lay of the Last Minstrel", and could repeat the whole of that long poem, more than six hundred lines, from memory.
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