wood; a fine, true, homely thing, its very homeliness shaming the prim, curled, smiling, leering, would-be-consumptive misses, exhibited in the windows of the fashionable music-seller to-we speak advisedly-the loss of much public money, and, what is almost as bad, to the imminent danger of public morality. If the lover of true pictorial beauty, illustrative of musical sentiment, would see, and seeing be uplifted and instructed, let him seek a dead wall, vivified and made harmonious by a thousand penny ballads. There, indeed, he may look on simple loveliness; there, art, unadorned, naked as truth, woos and, if he be worth the catching, inevitably makes him captive. Hark! listen; melodies breathe from the bricks: that wall, so seeming mute and dead, is musical as the blocks of Memnon.

The Ballad-Singer of our day rarely rises above the blackguard (Southey has made the word classic) and vagabond. His strains are, for the most part, the vilest begging set to the vilest music. He takes temporary promotion at an election, merging the mendicant in the more honourable appointment of party-minstrel. He sings the merits of the new candidate, and exposes the frailties and venalities of his opponent, with a modesty and energy that sometimes reminds us of the House of Commons. The BalladSinger, pending the election-alas! poor chorister, reform hath cruelly abridged his singing season-is, indeed, a parliamentary agent of no small importance; he may take rank with the solicitor, the professional friend of the candidate; and, if his voice and style of singing have won a few votes for his employer, they have doubtless been as honestly obtained as many procured by the man of law, who in the course of the canvas may have exhibited a sudden love of kittens and canaries, paying for them ten and twenty pounds per individual.

Still, however, we have the Political Ballad Singer; still the street-minstrel celebrates the downfall of a ministry; still he has at times something to sing about the royal household. Now and then, too, he fearlessly attacks a growing vice, to the amusement if not to the edification of his hearers. Like the preacher, however, the Ballad-Singer finds his auditors increase with the fierceness and causticity of his style. A short time since, we paused to listen to the mud-notes wild of a street-singer : it grieves us to state, that he sang not to the praise, but to the dishonour of women, who, nevertheless, with the characteristic patience that ennobles them, making them smile wickedness itself into good behaviour, stood in a ring of five or six deep about the slanderer, mutely, hanging upon the fellow's words, and now and then uttering the prettiest contempt of his miserable libels. However, in the face of one creature we saw the growing anger spot;

"Infamous! he ought to be taken up, come away!" and she urged a matronly companion, who placidly replied, "Not yet, Mary Anne-let's wait, only just to hear how far the fellow's impudence will carry him." (It would possibly shock the selflove of many sulphureous lecturers, followed as they seem for the beauty of their talk, were the true cause of their popularity as ingeniously unfolded to them.)

The Sailor Ballad-Singer has died with the long peace; he no longer attacks our sympathies with one arm and a wooden leg; maimed limbs have become scarce. Now and then, when we presume little is to be got by picking pockets-for, in all professions, there is, probably, a longer or shorter vacation-half-adozen fellows condescend to wear check shirts, and if the weather be fiercely cold, to walk with bare, clean-washed feet, executing, as they pick their way, “Ben Bowline," or at times plunging with one accord into the " Bay of Biscay."

At times we come upon ballad-singing that has its plaintiveness; a pathos, independent of the words and air, though the ballad shall be sweetly sung. May such singing be seldom heard; may the passenger be rarely stopped when hurrying on a winter's night homeward, by the low, sweet voice of some thinly-clad woman, hugging her child, for whom and it may be for others, her wretched minstrelsy is to buy a supper. We have heard such singing; and the tune of the minstrel, the intonation of the words, told a tale of misery; declared that she had suffered many rubs of fortune; that she was not born to sing the requiem of her own lungs in November's fog and January's blast.

The respectable Ballad-Singer is our aversion: the impostor who, acting in broad day an overwhelming sense of his degradation, sings in strictest confidence to himself; or, whose fortissimo shall be no louder than that of a bee bumbling in a flower. He is, he will tell you, a most respectable tradesman, who has endured incalculable losses; and who, if you could really come to his secret history, would much rather try to sing than work. The true interests of ballad-singing, as a picturesque calling, have been much injured by such varlets.

The Ballad-Singer who at watering-places carols to young ladies, and sings away the peace of families, is not to our purpose. He is beyond the minstrel of the gutter, and not quite up to the Apollo of a tea-gardens. Besides, there is a mystery about him which we care not to unravel. Heaven knows, he may be a Polish prince, and he may be only a runaway pinmaker.

We have now no Ballad-Singers of character; no professed, constant minstrels, chanting their daily rounds, and growing

grey, it may be, to one everlasting strain-to one untiring song. The knaves who now chirp in the highways are, like grasshoppers, but of a season; their music tarries not with us; their sweet voices pass from our memories with the air they die upon; they make no part of our household recollections, but are thankfully got rid of at the turning of the street. It was not always so. The reader must remember two or three Ballad-Singers of his youth, whose harmonies rude or dulcet still vibrate in his heart, and make a child of him again. For ourselves, we have twonay, three favourites of the highway minstrelsy. It is but to name them, and if the reader be of London breeding, he needs must recognise the vocal wayfarers.

Our first acquaintance was an old blind man, familiarly named Billy. He had only one song: it was, however, recommended by a fiddle accompaniment. Billy's song-it had worn him into wrinkles-was,

"Oh! listen-listen to the voice of love!

Billy had a rich falsetto. Billy knew it: hence you could have sooner drawn him from his skin than make him quit his falsetto; for he would murmur, preludise a few low notes, then rush into it, and, once there, he knew too well his own strength to quit it on small occasion. Billy's falsetto was his fastness, where he capered and revelled in exulting security. We hear it now; yes, we listen to his "love" whooping through wintry darkness -proudly crowing above the din of the street-shouting triumphantly above the blast-a loud-voiced Cupid "horsing the wind." Was it a fine cunning on the part of the musician-we trust it was-that made him subdue into the lowest mutterings all the rest of the song, giving the whole of his falsetto, and with it all his enthusiasm, to the one word "love?" If this were art, it was art of the finest touch. Nor must we pass the fingering of his instrument: he would tuck his chin into his bosom, and smiling, now blandly, now grimly, on that soul-ravishing bit of wood, twitch and snatch, and drag away its music with most potent and relentless hand; more, he was so absorbed, so bound by his art, that if the fiddle had been suddenly displaced for a battledore, we believe that Billy would have bowed and fingered away all heedless of the change. Poor Billy! He had a sleek, happy, well-fed look; and though we have known a worse falsetto than his ten thousand times better paid, we have a comfortable hope that it procured for him all the decencies of board and lodging. We have liked several Ballad-Singers; but Billy was a "first-love."

Has the reader ever been startled by

-"Philomel down in the grove,"

suddenly piped into his ear—and, looking round, has he discovered an old, lean, withered woman, who-after some investigation— has proved to be the minstrel? Twenty years ago she sang that one song, and then it seemed the song of the swan-a dying strain: then she was age-stricken, and now—we heard her not a month ago—she seems no older. We had lost her for some years, when one night,

-"Philomel down in the grove,"

Its

with its shrill charm, brought back scenes of boyhood. wailing, melancholy sound was as the voice of departed years; the requiem of a hopeful time.

Can we close this paper, without one word to thee, O, William Waters? Blithest of blacks! Ethiopian Grimaldi! They who saw thee not, cannot conceive the amount of grace co-existent with a wooden leg-the comedy budding from timber. Then Billy's complexion ! We never saw a black so black: his face seemed polished, trickling with good-humour. Who ever danced as he danced? Waters was a genius; his life gave warranty of it, nor did his death disprove it, for he died in a workhouse.

We would say one word on-not a Ballad-Singer, but an instrumental musician. If the reader be four-score-ten, he must, as a thing of his childhood, remember a little blind woman, with a face like a withered apple, who still plays upon the hurdy. gurdy. No man can tell the age of that minstrel; for she lives and grinds music at this very hour. There was a dark legend that, some years ago, she was an opera-singer-a prima donna of even more than professional caprice and arrogance—and that, as a punishment, Apollo doomed her to the menial footing of a pedestrian musician. The tale is in some measure borne out by the fact that she walks rapidly on, never pausing for the alms of the charitable, but turning, turning, eternally turning. It is said that this her punishment is to continue until opera-singers become not a whit more conceited or more arrogant than other people. If such be the case, God help that woman!

We close our paper with an anecdote of Bishop Corbet—all ought to know his cordial poems-who, when a doctor of divinity, one day at Abingdon heard a Ballad-Singer complain that he could not sell his ware. On which, the doctor donned the minstrel's leathern jacket, "went out into the street, and drew around him a crowd of admiring buyers."

THE HANGMAN.

IN Sir John Suckling's incoherent play of "The Goblins," a certain courtier is thus apostrophised:

"A foolish utensil of state

Which, like old plate upon a gaudy day,

'S brought forth to make a show, and that is all,
For of no use you are."

The sentence fits the Hangman better than the courtier; is even a juster description of the man of hemp than of the man of brocade; for with ourselves, the legendary grimness of the licensed man-killer suffers from the foolishness-the utter inutility of his calling; he is, indeed, a wicked superfluity; and yet the official iniquity appears less, from a besetting conviction of its absurdity. Our disgust is, in a strange degree, allayed by our contempt. The Hangman is a man of terrors; notwithstanding, there are moods in which we cannot refuse to him the cap and bells. The folly of the employer is reflected on the employed. The statesman, though he despatch with sad and solemn brow the sacrilegious death-warrant, by the very farce enacted by virtue of the instrument, makes the Hangman little else than clown to the rope.

"But, murder, sir-murder," says a placid gentleman, oozing at the lips with Christian precept; "surely, sir-God bless me ! ―surely you would hang for murder?"

Blood has been shed: yes, in some fiend-like brawl, a miserable wretch, denaturalized by rage-goaded by revenge-or, more appalling still, pricked on by gain-sheds blood. He murders his fellow-man, and on the instant, from crown to sole, is he become a monster: humanity shrinks from contact with him: we turn from the murderer's eye as from a basilisk; to breathe with him the same atmosphere is, we feel, to breathe contagion. He stands, to our imagination, horribly dilated-as though possessed by the everlasting demon. He is set apart-fenced