This eBook transcribed by Les Bowler
p.iiTHE BOOK OF BALLADS
edited by
BON GAULTIER
WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES
illustrated by
DOYLE, LEECH, AND CROWQUILL
new edition
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
MCMIV
All Rights reserved
p.vPREFACE.
A further edition of this book—the sixteenth—having beencalled for, I have been asked by the publishers to furnish a preface toit. For prefaces I have no love. Books should speak forthemselves. Prefaces can scarcely be otherwise than egotistic, andone would not willingly add to the too numerous illustrations of thistendency with which the literature of the day abounds. I would muchrather leave the volume with the simple “Envoy” which I wrotefor it when the Bon Gaultier Ballads were first gathered into avolume. There the products of the dual authorship of Aytoun andmyself were ascribed to the Bon Gaultier under whose editorial auspicesthey had for the most part seen the light. But my publishers tell mep. vithatpeople want to know why, and how, and by which of us these poems werewritten,—curiosity, complimentary, no doubt, but which it is by nomeans easy for the surviving bard to satisfy. It is sixty years sincemost of these verses were written with the light heart and fluent pen ofyouth, and with no thought of their surviving beyond the natural life ofephemeral magazine pieces of humour. After a long and very crowdedlife, of which literature has occupied the smallest part, it is difficultfor me to live back into the circumstances and conditions under which theywere written, or to mark, except to a very limited extent, how far toAytoun, and how far to myself, separately, the contents of the volume areto be assigned. I found this difficult when I wrote Aytoun’sLife in 1867, and it is necessarily a matter of greater difficulty now in1903.
I can but endeavour to show how Aytoun and I came together, and how fortwo or three years we worked together in literature. Aytoun (born21st June 1813) was three years older than myself, and he was known alreadyas a writer in ‘Blackwood’s Magazine’ when I made hisacquaintance in 1841. For p. viisome years I had been writing in Tait’sand Fraser’s Magazines, and elsewhere, articles and verses, chieflyhumorous, both in prose and