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Vagabond ballad-singers and story-tellers creatures who wander from house to house, mending broken pottery, collecting rags or selling small pedlar's wares were the old clothesmen who carried about these bits of tarnished poetic finery.
There was a merry-go-round and a greasy pole; there was a juggler who swallowed knives and ribbons; there were fortune-tellers without number; there were dining-booths, and drinking-booths, and dancing-booths; there were acrobats, organ-boys with monkeys, and Savoyards with white mice; there were stalls for the sale of cakes, fruit, sweetmeats, toys, combs, cheap jewelry, glass, crockery, boots and shoes, holy-water vessels, rosaries, medals, and little colored prints of saints and martyrs; there were brass bands, and string bands, and ballad-singers everywhere; and there was an atmosphere compounded of dust, tobacco-smoke, onions, musk, and every objectionable perfume under heaven.
Ballad-singers come and chant here, in deadly, guttural tones, satirical songs against the Whig administration, against the bishops and dignified clergy, against the German relatives of an august royal family; Punch sets up his theater, sure of an audience, and occasionally of a halfpenny from the swarming occupants of the houses; women scream after their children for loitering in the gutter, or, worse still, against the husband who comes reeling from the gin-shop.
The famous bards, and story-tellers and harpists would not come until noon-time when the business of the fair would have abated, but with the crowd of beggars came ballad-singers, and the tellers of the stories that were called "Go-by-the-Market-Stake," because they were told around the stake in the market place and were very common.
But the memory of man is too perilous a repository for such interesting material; and it is greatly to be wished that some clever Italian, who is fitted for the task, would interest himself to collect them and give them a permanent place in the literature of his language. But to return to our ballad-singers, whom we have left in the middle of their song, and who are now finishing.
The difference between then and now would seem to reside in the fact, that poetry is more easily remembered than prose. From the time of Homer until long after the invention of printing, not only were ballad-singers and harpers in good demand, but the recital of poetry was also a favorite means of livelihood to indigent scholars and others, who wandered about like the minstrels.
Should not then musical composers, poor, and hard beset, and who, moreover, are forced to coin their inspiration into gold, to spin out the thread of life withal, be allowed to apply this law to themselves, and banish out of the neighbourhood all ballad-singers and bagpipers?
One of the ballad-singers approached, and striking her guitar with peculiar earnestness, began to sing a doleful air, full of sinister forebodings. Inez started with surprise. It was the same ballad-singer that had addressed her in the garden of the Generaliffe. It was the same air that she had then sung. It spoke of impending dangers; they seemed, indeed, to be thickening around her.
One of these epigrams composed in the name of Flamininus runs thus: Zenos io kraipnaisi gegathotes ipposunaisi Kouroi, io Spartas Tundaridai basileis, Aineadas Titos ummin upertatos opase doron Ellenon teuxas paisin eleutherian. II. IX. Ballad-Singers The later rule, by which the freedman necessarily bore the -praenomen- of his patron, was not yet applied in republican Rome.
Many of our ballad-singers are disguised emigrants; and I know a ci-devant Marquis who is, incognito, a groom to a contractor, the son of his uncle's porter. Our old pedlars complain that their trade is ruined by the Counts, by the Barons and Chevaliers who have monopolized all their business.
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