Crossword-Solution: BALLAD 6 letters, 128 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 9

Bob Coggan was sent home for his ill manners, and tranquility was restored by Jacob Smallbury, who volunteered a ballad as inclusive and interminable as that with which the worthy toper old Silenus amused on a similar occasion the swains Chromis and Mnasylus, and other jolly dogs of his day.

Here, it is true, were none of the appliances which popular merriment would so readily have found in the England of Elizabeth’s time, or that of James—no rude shows of a theatrical kind; no minstrel, with his harp and legendary ballad, nor gleeman with an ape dancing to his music; no juggler, with his tricks of mimic witchcraft; no Merry Andrew, to stir up the multitude with jests, perhaps a hundred years old, but still effective, by their appeals to the very broadest sources of mirthful sympathy.

The knight in the meantime, had brought the strings into some order, and after a short prelude, asked his host whether he would choose a “sirvente” in the language of “oc”, or a “lai” in the language of “oui”, or a “virelai”, or a ballad in the vulgar English.

What did all this portend, and what portended the swift hoisting-up of Monsieur Gabelle behind a servant on horseback, and the conveying away of the said Gabelle (double-laden though the horse was), at a gallop, like a new version of the German ballad of Leonora? It portended that there was one stone face too many, up at the chateau.

You can imagine what evenings I have here among my shelves, now the long dark nights are come! Of course until ten o'clock, when I shut up shop, I am constantly interrupted--as I have been during this letter, once to sell a copy of Helen's Babies and once to sell The Ballad of Reading Gaol, so you can see how varied are my clients' tastes! But later on, after we have had our evening cocoa and Helen has gone to bed, I prowl about the place, dipping into this and that, fuddling myself with speculation.