But if these chants “have not much meaning,” they will not produce the desired effect of touching the heart, as well as giving vigour to the arm of the labourer.  The gondoliers of Venice while away their long midnight hours on the water with the stanzas of Tasso.  Fragments of Homer are sung by the Greek sailors of the Archipelago; the severe labour of the trackers, in China, is accompanied with a song which encourages their exertions, and renders these simultaneous.  Mr. Ellis mentions that the sight of the lofty pagoda of Tong-chow served as a great topic of incitement in the song of the trackers, toiling against the stream, to their place of rest.  The canoemen, on the Gold Coast, in a very dangerous passage, “on the back of a high curling wave, paddling with all their might, singing or rather shouting their wild song, follow it up,” says M’Leod, who was a lively witness of this happy combination of song, of labour, and of peril, which he acknowledged was “a very terrific process.”  Our sailors at Newcastle, in heaving their anchors, have their “Heave and ho! rum-below!” but the Sicilian mariners must be more deeply affected by their beautiful hymn to the Virgin.  A society, instituted in Holland for general good, do not consider among their least useful projects that of having printed at a low price a collection of songs for sailors.

It is extremely pleasing, as it is true, to notice the honest exultation of an excellent ballad-writer, C. Dibdin, in his Professional Life.  “I have learnt my songs have been considered as an object of national consequence; that they have been the solace of sailors and long voyagers, in storms, in battle; and that they have been quoted in mutinies, to the restoration of order and discipline."[60] The Portuguese soldiery in Ceylon, at the siege of Colombo, when pressed with misery and the pangs of hunger, during their marches, derived not only consolation, but also encouragement, by rehearsing the stanzas of the Lusiad.

We ourselves have been a great ballad nation, and once abounded with songs of the people; not, however, of this particular species, but rather of narrative poems.  They are described by Puttenham, a critic in the reign of Elizabeth, as “small and popular songs sung by those Cantabanqui, upon benches and barrels’ heads, where they have no other audience than boys, or country fellows that pass by them in the streets; or else by blind harpers, or such like tavern minstrels, that give a fit of mirth for a groat.”  Such were these “Reliques of Ancient English Poetry,” which Selden collected, Pepys preserved, and Percy published.  Ritson, our great poetical antiquary in these sort of things, says that few are older than the reign of James I. The more ancient songs of the people perished by having been printed in single sheets, and by their humble purchasers having no other library to preserve them than the walls on which they pasted them.  Those we have consist of a succeeding race of ballads, chiefly revived or written by Richard Johnson, the author of the well-known romance of the Seven Champions, and Delony, the writer of Jack of Newbury’s Life, and the “Gentle Craft,” who lived in the time of James and Charles.[61] One Martin Parker was a most notorious ballad scribbler in the reign of Charles I. and the Protector.