A Collection of Old Ballads. Corrected from the best and most ancient copies extant. With introductions, historical, critical, or humorous. Illustrated with copper plates. [Collected by Ambrose Philips?
A three-volume anthology of English broadside ballads with historical and humorous introductions, compiled in London in the 1720s (credited to Ambrose Philips) and reissued here by Trübner in 1871, aimed at antiquarian readers and collectors of popular verse. The plates are small upright copper engravings, hatched and outlined in plain line, showing ballad narratives as staged tableaux: a torchlit prison corridor, a cavalry melee before rows of tents, a queen enthroned under a canopy, a public beheading ringed by pikemen \u2014 usable as compact framed vignettes, crowd silhouettes and period costume reference.
