slightly changed) in his Extracts (II, 6–7), prefaced by the note, "The original ballad . . . has been preserved in a MS. belonging to the Editor, but we are not aware that it exists any where in print"![1]
16. "The ioy of Virginitie: to, The Gods of loue."
This is a moralization of Elderton's "Gods of Love," which was published in 1562: this date can be established by the fact that William Birch's "The complaint of a sinner, vexed with paine. . . After W[illiam] E[lderton] moralized," was printed in 1562–63 (Trans., I, 205; reprinted in Collmann's Ballads and Broadsides, No. 7). Innumerable moralizations, answers, and imitations appeared during the next four or five years, and No. 16 is not improbably one of the ballads actually registered (Trans., I, 272, 307, 355). Elderton's ballad was imitated in George Turbervile's Epitaphes, 1565?, 1567, and in many plays printed circa 1566. It seems almost certain, then, that No. 16 had been printed before 1566.
- ↑ This remark is incredible; for in his first volume of Extracts Collier had exerted himself to identify the ballads published in the Handfull with ballads licensed before 1566, and he must have known that "Maid, Will You Marry?" was printed there. One might suspect that he made this statement to gain confidence in the authenticity of his MS. The MS. is described and a table of its contents given in the Extracts, II, vii–x, but naturally it has long been an object of suspicion (cf. Professor C. H. Firth's comment in the recently published Shakespeare's England, Oxford, 1916, II, 537). Those who are interested in the matter and who wish to draw their own conclusions will find it profitable to compare the ballad of "All in a Garden Green" (cf. No. 18 below), printed in the Extracts, I, 196, with "A merrye new ballad, of a countrye wench and a clowne" printed in the Shirburn Ballads, p. 220; Collier's "Lady Jane's Lament" (Extracts, I, 72) with the printed ballad included in the Ballad Society's Ballads from MSS., I, 427; Collier's "The Damned Soule in Hell" (Extracts, I, 117) with "The pittifull lamentation of a damned soule" (Shirburn Ballads, p. 260); Collier's "Kit hath Lost her Key" (Extracts, I, 55) with the ballad printed from Royal MSS. App. 58 by E. Flügel in Anglia, XII, 261; Collier's "Wine, Women, and Dice" (Extracts, II, 69, evidently written to fit the entries in the Transcript, I, 293, 296) with "A notable Instrucyon for all men to beware the abuses of dyce, wyne, & women," which is preserved in MS. Cotton. Vesp. A. XXV (ed. Boeddeker, Jahrbuch für romanische und englische Sprache, N. F., II, 364); Collier's ballad of "Awake and Arise" (Extracts, I, 186, and notice especially his explanation there) with a copy (of whose existence he was unaware) preserved in MS. Ashmole 48 (ed. Wright, p. 32). Quite a number of ballads in Collier's MS. fit exactly entries in the Registers and yet are not referred to in the Extracts. William Chappell, in his Popular Music,
