well. 'Tis custom that prevents the ill effects of habits that
seem likely to injure mental and moral health. Foreigners
judging from the low dresses in our ball-rooms, English maids
judging from French fishwomen's bare legs, often come to
very wrong conclusions. Water clear to one generation needs
straining for the next. Even Percy, and he a bishop, has not
marked with his three crosses (his marks of loose and humorous
songs) a few which we, easy-going laymen, have now thought
better to transfer to this volume. These are, See the Bwild-
inge, Fryar and Boye, The Man that hath, Dulcina, Cooke
Laurell, The Mode of France, Lye alone, Downe sate the
Shepard. We have not written Introductions to every one of
these pieces, as to the Ballads and Romances of the MS.
it be enough that they are put in type.

Let

1 Cp. Punch: "But that indelicate! There! you might have knocked me down with a feather!"

SECOND NOTICE.

SOME of these songs the Editors would have been glad had it not fallen to their lot to put forth. But, as was said before, they are part of the Manuscript which has to be printed entire, and must be therefore issued. They are also part of our Elizabethan and Jacobite times; and when you are drawing a noble old oak, you must sketch its scars and disfigurements as well as the glory of its bark, its fruit and leaves. Students must work from the nude, or they'll never draw.

Of the general character of Early English Literature enough has been said in the Introduction to Conscience, in vol. ii. of the Ballads and Romances; but no age, no man, has been without drawbacks, without sensual feelings or the expression of them. They are natural: improper delight in them alone is wrong. And from the expressions of this improper delight our Early Literature is singularly free. Plain speaking there is, broad humour there is; but of delight in sensuality for sensuality's sake, there is very little indeed. Some of it is here, but it's of our Middle Time, a time when the pressure of early wrongs, and perchance the earnestness of national feeling, had somewhat lessened, when luxury and indulgence more abounded. It is well for the student to see it, that he may be under no illusion as to that time; as it will be right for the student of Victorian England, two or three hundred years hence, to see productions

that we would not willingly circulate now. But still, let no one doubt that Professor Morley's words are true that the spirit of our Early and Middle Times was noble and pure; that, notwithstanding prurient novels and review-articles, and Holywell Street filth, our Victorian time is, in the main, noble and pure too.

The Poems not marked with Percy's three crosses as loose, which we have transferred to these pages, are Men that more; Panche; In a May Morninge; The Turk in Linen; Louers hearke alarum; O nay, O nay, not yet; I cannot be contented; Lillumwham; Last night I thought; A Dainty Ducke (incomplete); A mayden heade; Tom Longe; All in a greene meadowe.

We had not at first intended to have side-notes added to this volume, but See the bwildinge, the Fryar and Boye, and some other poems, having been set with side-notes for the Ballads and Romances before they were turned into this volume, the rest of the pieces were side-noted for uniformity's sake. The italics in the text are extensions of the contractions of the Manuscript.

August, 1867.