Excerpt from Sea Songs and Ballads The sentiment was invariably unexceptionable. No one could point to a single song of the kind in which there was the smallest taint of lubricity. They usually had some sort of lesson in them, something that might be called a moral. The merits of the brave, the loving, the loyal sailor were, not too noisily, held up for ad miration and imitation, neither of which was to fail because courage, and affection, and loyalty had not always sufficed to preserve the hero and bring him back safe to his home and his sweetheart. The kind of female friend to whom there are so many allusions in the sea songs of regular song-writers had no existence in the Fore-bitter. It is certain that no singer who introduced them into his lay would have been listened to. It took a good many years and the complete ex tinction of the old sea-dogs of King Billy's reign or of Queen Victoria's earlier years before the double. 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.