The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman

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Synopsis:
An excerpt from the book:In some collection of old English Ballads there is an ancient ditty whichI am told bears some remote and distant resemblance to the following EpicPoem. I beg to quote the emphatic language of my estimable friend (if hewill allow me to call him so), the Black Bear in Piccadilly, and to assureall to whom these presents may come, that "_I_ am the original." Thisaffecting legend is given in the following pages precisely as I havefrequently heard it sung on Saturday nights, outside a house of generalrefreshment (familiarly termed a wine vaults) at Battle-bridge. The singeris a young gentleman who can scarcely have numbered nineteen summers,and who before his last visit to the treadmill, where he was erroneouslyincarcerated for six months as a vagrant (being unfortunately mistakenfor another gentleman), had a very melodious and plaintive tone of voice,which, though it is now somewhat impaired by gruel and such a getting upstairs for so long a period, I hope shortly to find restored. I have takendown the words from his own mouth at different periods, and have beencareful to preserve his pronunciation, together with the air to which hedoes so much justice. Of his execution of it, however, and the intensemelancholy which he communicates to such passages of the song as are mostsusceptible of such an expression, I am unfortunately unable to convey tothe reader an adequate idea, though I may hint that the effect seems to meto be in part produced by the long and mournful drawl on the last two orthree words of each verse.