And music murmuring round his tongue." Fearless children of nature these strolling poets were, even as the songs they sang. "Little recked they, our bards of old, Of autumn's showers, or winter's cold. Sound slept they on the 'nighted hill, Lulled by the winds, or bubbling rill, Curtained within the winter cloud, The heath their couch, the sky their shroud; Yet theirs the strains that touch the heart,-- Bold, rapid, wild, and void of art." The value and hence the dignity of the minstrel's profession declined with the progress of the printing-press in popular favor, and the character of the gleemen suffered in consequence. This was more marked in England than in Scotland. Indeed, the question has been raised as to whether there ever existed a class of Englishmen who were both ballad-singers and ballad-makers. This was one of the points at issue between those eminent antiquarians, Bishop Percy and Mr. Ritson, in the eighteenth century. Dr. Percy had defined the English minstrels as an "order of men in the middle ages, who subsisted by the arts of poetry and music, and sung to the harp the verses which they themselves composed." The inflammable Joseph Ritson, whose love of an honest ballad goes far to excuse him for his lack of gentle demeanor toward the unfaithful editor of the _Reliques,_ pounced down so fiercely upon this definition, contending that, however applicable to Icelandic skalds or Norman trouveres or ProvenASal troubadours, it was altogether too flattering for the vagabond fiddlers of England, roughly trolling over to tavern audiences the ballads borrowed from their betters, that the dismayed bishop altered his last clause to read, "verses composed by themselves or others." Sir Walter Scott sums up this famous quarrel with his characteristic good-humor. "The debate," he says, "resembles the apologue of the gold and silver shield. Dr. Percy looked on the minstrel in the palmy and exalted state to which, no doubt, many were elevated by their talents, like those who possess excellence in the fine arts in the present day; and Ritson considered the reverse of the medal, when the poor and wandering gleeman was glad to purchase his bread by singing his ballads at the ale-house, wearing a fantastic habit, and latterly sinking into a mere crowder upon an untuned fiddle, accompanying his rude strains with a ruder ditty, the helpless associate of drunken revellers, and marvellously afraid of the constable and parish beadle." There is proof enough that, by the reign of Elizabeth, the printer was elbowing the minstrel out into the gutter. In Scotland the strolling bard was still not without honor, but in the sister country we find him denounced by ordinance together with "rogues, vagabonds, and