Brewer's: Ballads

Let me make the ballads, and who will may make the laws.” Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, in Scotland, wrote to the Marquis of Montrose, “I knew a very wise man of Sir Christopher Musgrave's sentiment. He believed, if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws” (1703).

Source: Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, E. Cobham Brewer, 1894
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