Excerpt from Strange Histories: Consisting of Ballads and Other Poems The small volume in octavo, reprinted in the following pages, appears to contain a collection of most of Deloney's historical ballads, though not all he had separately printed before his decease. It is very possible that there was'a still earlier edition of Strange Histories thanthat we have made use of, and that it ended with the Speech between certain Ladies, &c. On Salisbury Plain. How that piece of prose came to be inserted we know not; but it relates to events more than a century older than the period when the volume was published, and is not in any way connected with the immediate subject of the ballad which precedes it. The title-page might be new in 1607, in the same way that the work appears to have been reprinted in 1612 (the edition noticed by Bishop Percy), without any information that the contents had ever appeared before. Deloney's ballad of Fair Rosamond was perhaps first added to the collection in 1607, and the copy we supply must be looked upon as the earliest and most authentic impression of i that celebrated production: it will, be found to differ very materially from that furnished by Bishop Percy. Several other ballads in the ensuing pages have also been inserted in different works of the same class, both ancient and modern, but never in so genuine a shape as they bear in Strange Histories. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.