Hoyt & Roberts, comps. Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations. 1922.
Ballads
I’ve now got the music book ready,
Do sit up and sing like a lady
A recitative from Tancredi,
And something about “Palpiti!”
Sing forte when first you begin it,
Piano the very next minute,
They’ll cry “What expression there’s in it!”
Don’t sing English ballads to me!
Thomas Haynes Bayly—Don’t Sing English Ballads to Me.
The farmer’s daughter hath soft brown hair
(Butter and eggs and a pound of cheese)
And I met with a ballad, I can’t say where,
That wholly consisted of lines like these.
Charles S. Calverly—Ballad.
Thespis, the first professor of our art,
At country wakes sung ballads from a cart.
Dryden—Prologue to Sophonisba.
I knew a very wise man that believed that***if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.
Andrew Fletcher—Quoting the Earl of Cromarty. Letters to the Marquis of Montrose. In Fletcher’s Works. P. 266. (Ed. 1749).
Some people resemble ballads which are only sung for a certain time.
La Rochefoucauld—Maxims. No. 220.
I have a passion for ballads.***They are the gypsy children of song, born under green hedgerows in the leafy lanes and bypaths of literature,—in the genial Summertime.
Longfellow—Hyperion. Bk. II. Ch. II.
For a ballad’s a thing you expect to find lies in.
Samuel Lover—Paddy Blake’s Echo.
More solid things do not show the complexion of the times so well as Ballads and Libels.
John Seldon—Libels. (Libels-pamphlets, libellum, a small book.)
I had rather be a kitten, and cry mew!
Than one of these same metre ballad-mongers.
Henry IV. Pt. I. Act III. Sc. 1. L. 129.
I love a ballad but even too well; if it be doleful matter, merrily set down, or a very pleasant thing indeed, and sung lamentably.
Winter’s Tale. Act IV. Sc. 4. L. 187.
A famous man is Robin Hood,
The English ballad-singer’s joy.
Wordsworth—Rob Roy’s Grave.