“Athenæus has preserved the Greek names of different songs as sung by various trades, but unfortunately none of the songs themselves. There was a song for the corn-grinders; another for the workers in wool; another for the weavers. The reapers had their carol; the herdsmen had a song which an oxdriver of Sicily had composed; the kneaders, and the bathers, and the galley-rowers, were not without their chant. We have ourselves a song of the weavers, which Ritson has preserved in his 'Ancient Songs' and it may be found in the popular chap-book of 'The Life of Jack of Newbury;' and the songs of anglers, of old Isaac Walton, and Charles Cotton, still retain their freshness.

Mr Heber has beautifully observed, in his Bampton Lectures, that among the Greeks the hymn which placed Harmodius in the green and flowery island of the Blessed was chanted by the potter to his wheel, and enlivened the labours of the Piræn mariner.

Dr Johnson is the only writer I recollect who has noticed something of this nature which he observed in the Highlands. 'The strokes of the sickle were
timed by the modulation of the harvest song, in which all their voices were united. They accompany every action which can be done in equal time with an appropriate strain, which has, they say, not much meaning, but its effects are regularity and cheerfulness. There is an oar song used by the Hebrideans.'

But if these chants 'have not much meaning,' they will not produce the desired effect of touching the heart, as well as giving vigour to the arm of the labourer. The gondoliers of Venice while away their long midnight hours on the water with the stanzas of Tasso. Fragments of Homer are sung by the Greek sailors of the Archipelago ; the severe labour of the trackers, in China, is accompanied with a song which encourages their exertions, and renders these simultaneous. Mr Ellis mentions, that the sight of the lofty pagoda of Tong-chow served as a great topic of incitement in the song of the trackers toiling against the stream, to their place of rest. The canoe-men, on the Gold Coast, in a very dangerous passage, 'on the back of a high-curling wave, paddling with all their might, singing or rather shouting their wild song, follow it up,' says M'Leod, who was a lively witness of this happy combination of song, of labour, and of peril, which he acknowledges was ' a very terrific process.' Our sailors at Newcastle, in heaving their anchors, have their ' Heave, and ho ! rum-below !' but the Sicilian mariners must be more deeply affected by their beautiful hymn to the Virgin! A society instituted in Holland for general good do not consider among their least useful projects that of having printed at a low price a collection of songs for sailors.

It is extremely pleasing, as it is true, to notice the honest exultation of an excellent ballad-writer, C. Dibdin, who in his Professional Life, p. 8, writes — 'I have learnt my songs have been considered as an object of national consequence; that they have been the solace of sailors and long voyagers, in storms, in battle ; and that they have been quoted in mutinies, to the restoration of order and discipline.' It is recorded of the Portuguese soldiery in Ceylon, at the siege of Colombo, when pressed with misery and the pangs of hunger, that they derived, during their marches, not only consolation, but also encouragement, by rehearsing the stanzas of the Lusiad.”
[Songs of Trades, or Songs for the People, Vol.III, D'Israeli, 1833]