Southern ballad-printers favoured the merry or tragic themes of legend and history,[14] and if few of their songs had the trumpet-note of “Chevy Chase”, they lacked neither freshness nor vigour. Some, like “the Blind Beggar’s Daughter of Bednall-Green”, gave a fresh turn to Elizabethan traditions, and made up for indifferent workmanship by a plentiful force of rhythm. Late nursery poets could not better this trick of the ballad-maker’s: