One does not ordinarily associate the Elizabethan broadside with classical antiquity, although the ballads of the late sixteenth century are fairly studded with allusions to ancient literature. It is unlikely that the inquiring, responsive writers of the day should not have exhibited, in some slight way, their knowledge of the older literatures. When Thomas Newton confessed his translation of Seneca to be “an unflidge nestling, unable to fly: an unnatural abortion, and an unperfect Embroyon,” he was indicting much of the more shallow scholarship of his contemporaries. With such thorough-paced savants as Cheke and Ascham, Mulcaster and Camden, we have no business; but it is interesting to note the way in which their more lowly brethren used their learning. When ballad writers try to put their classics to good account in making a broadside doggerel of some ancient myth, the results are at once ludicrous and irritating—ludicrous in their naive distortion of source, irritating in their flagrant violation of whatever decorous beauty the original may have had. I shall attempt to sketch a few of the ways in which the popular writer's classical education influenced the most thoroughly popular of literary productions, the broadside ballad. The querulous will immediately raise the caveat that these ephemeral broadsides can hardly be dignified with the term “literary productions,” but when one considers that Surrey and Dyer, as well as Elderton and Deloney, had their poetic efforts published in this form, the distinction seems factitious.