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��NOTES BY THE WAY.
��The Ballad Society.
��Roxburgh e
Ballads completed.
��THE BALLAD SOCIETY.
While Ebsworth rendered service to literature and the arts in many ways, he has specially left an abiding name by the services he rendered to our Ballad history. The Ballad Society was started on the completion of the Percy Folio Manuscript in the spring of 1868, to continue the work begun by that undertaking the render- ing accessible to all subscribers, at the cost of an annual guinea, of the rare and large stores of Ballads in the public and, so far as possible the private collections of the country. The founders' wish was to have started the Society's work by printing the rarest of the collections, the Pepys ; but the Master and Fellows of Magdalen College, Cambridge, to whom it belonged, refused to allow the printing of the Pepys Ballads by the Society, and it became necessary to turn to the next most important set, the Roxburghe in the British Museum. This William Chappell kindly undertook to annotate, if not to edit. After editing three volumes, 1869-80, he retired ; and The Athenceum on the 1st of November, 1879, announced that Ebsworth had succeeded him as editor of ' The Roxburghe Ballads,' and by the end of 1880 he had completed the group of Amanda Ballads. For twenty-five years Ebsworth " persisted single-handed against wind and tide, and brought the barque to shore, the completed ' Roxburgh Ballads.' '
He often lamented that while he laboured so hard and gra- tuitously, lack of support kept him from making " what would have been valuable additions to my other volumes, for I knew where untold riches of MSS. and unreprinted black-letter Broadsides are attainable, and stored virtually unknown and apt to perish ; but nobody cared a button." The five volumes he edited contain over 1,071 reprinted ballads and 323 songs. Ebsworth claimed that " to every intelligent student our Bagford Ballads and our Roxburghe Ballads truthfully reveal the daily life of English people from year to year throughout more than one of the bygone centuries, but chiefly that which sped between the passing-away of the last Queen of the Tudor race and the incoming of the last Queen of the Stuart race. Here completed," continues Ebsworth in this final preface, " are the ballads which mirror for us well-nigh every sort of man or woman who lived in the days of the Stuarts, whether Cavalier or Roundhead. They speak to us through a Telephone of Song."
It was always a cause of regret to Ebsworth that " the com- pleted sheets can never more give pleasure to my dear friend and companion William Chappell, F.S.A.," who died on the 20th of August, 1888, eleven years before the publication of the final volume. He was buried at Kensal Green, his old friend reading the Burial Service.
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