ABSTRACT

Some of these ballads, like No. 4, ‘The Valiant Maid’, and No. 7, ‘Pity a Maiden’, relating to the press-gang, or No. 9, ‘The Bonny Blue Jacket’, about lovers parted by the wars, do something to reflect the historical conditions of the eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries: though they do so in the manner of poetry and fantasy more than realism.