nd the

rcy and the ballad collectors. What they had sought to do was to recall British poetry to the walks of imagination and to older and better models than Dryden and Pope. But they could not jump off their own shadows: the eighteenth century was too much for them. While they anxiously cultivated wildness and si

the curious that there was still extant a large body of popular poetry in the shape of narrative ballads, which had been handed down chiefly by oral transmission, and still lived in the memories and upon the lips of the common people. Many of these went back in their original shapes to the Middle Ages, or to an even remoter antiquity, and belonged to that great store of folk-lore which was the common inheritance of the Aryan race. Analogues and variants of favorite English and Scottish ballads have been traced through almost all the tongues of modern Europe. Danish literature is especially rich in ballads and affords valuable illustrations of our native ministrelsy.[1] It was, perhaps, due in part to the Danish settlements in Northumbria and to the large Scandinavian admixture in the Northumbrian blood and dialect, that "the north countrie" became par excellence the ballad land: Lowland Scotland-particularly the Lothians-and the English bordering counties, Northumberland, Westmoreland, and Cumberland; with Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire, in which were Barndale and Sherwood Forests, Robin Hood's haunts. It is

s and Fair Annet," "Lord Lovel," "Fair Janet," and many others. The knight who was carried to fairyland through an entrance in a green hillside, and abode seven years with the queen of fairy, recurs in "Tam Lin," "Thomas Rymer,"[3] etc. Like all folk-songs, these ballads are anonymous and may be regarded not as the composition of any one poet, but as the property, and in a sense the work, of the people as a whole. Coming out of an uncertain past, based on some dark legend of heart-break or b

ary culture. Whether the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" are the work of one poet or of a cycle of poets, doubtless the rhetorical peculiarities of the Homeric epics, such as the recurrent phrase and the conventional epithet (the rosy-fingered dawn, the well-greaved Greeks, the swift-footed Achilles, the much-endu

forms, the commonest of all being the old septenarius or "fourteener

rew the re

nd crew

to the yo

e we were

peculiarities of the ballads arose from the fact that they were made to be sung or recited from memory. Such are perhaps the division of the longer ones into fits, to rest the voice of the singer; and the use of the burden or refrain for the same purpose, as also to give the listeners and bystanders

hree locks o' h

e, O Bi

strung his

e mill-dams

erable relation to the

Expou

knicht riding

entle and

wooing at m

ies over the

ve been liberally employ

son in "Th

o sisters o

owling in tur

the fairer

l was fai

ather favored the inconsequential burden, an affe

fe sat at he

ggs and a pou

ad frequently

cles lay on he

daughter hath

ggs and a pou

a ballad, I c

nsisted of line

e refrain was that sing-song species of

a pu'd a d

but onl

sailed a leag

but bar

ome up? How c

I come t

of narration or a commonplace of description does duty again and again. Iteration in the ballads

ut on your r

our robes

gang wi' m

air Edin

ut on my ro

my robes

t on my rob

hrough Edi

greenwood, the gray goose wing, and the wan water are other inseparables of the kind. Still another mark is the frequent retention of the Middle English accent on the final syllable in words like contrié, barón, dinére, felàwe, abbày, rivére, monéy, and its assumption by words which never properly h

These are the street ballads, which were and still are hawked about by ballad-mongers, and which have no literary character whatever. There are satirical and political ballads, ballads versifying passages in Scripture or chronicle, ballads relating to current events, or giving the history of famous murders and other crimes, of prodigies, providences, and all sorts of happenings that teach a lesson in morals: about George Barnwell and the "Babes in the Wood," and "Whittington and his Cat," etc.: ballads like Shenstone's "Jemmy Dawson" and Gay's "Black-eyed Susan." Thousands of such are included in manuscript collection

dney in his "Defence of Poesie" in 1850.[8] The ballad is a narrative song, na?ve, impersonal, spontaneous, objective. The singer is lost in the song, the teller in the tale. That is its essence, but sometimes the story is told by the lyrical, sometimes by the dramatic method. In "Helen of Kirkconnell" it is the bereaved lover who is himself the speaker: in "Waly Waly," the forsaken maid. These are monologues; for a purely dialogue ballad it will be sufficient to mention the power and impressive piece in the "Reliques" entitled "Edward." Herder translated this in

en, drinkin

hey paid

combat th

it in the

maker does not vouchsafe explanations about persons and motives; often he gives the history, not expressly nor fully, but by hints and glimpses, leaving the rest to conjecture; thro

hame cam

ver ca

tly confessing, under his mother's questioning, that he dined w

yon auld f

lies a new-s

kens that he

his hound, a

is to the h

fetch the wi

ta'en ano

mak our di

rtly told and partly sung, and that the links and expositions were given in prose. However this may be, the artless art of these popular poets evidently included a knowledge of the uses of mystery and suggestion. They knew that, for the imagination, the part is sometimes greater than the whole. Gray wrote to Mason in 1757, "I have got the old Scotch ballad [Gil Maurice] on which 'Dougla

e acquired: the secret is lost. But Walter Scott, who was steeped to the lips in balladry, and whose temper had much of the healthy objectivity of an earlier age, has succeeded as well as any modern. Some of his ba

his charger

e river

e bride-re

ieu for

l

u for ev

g is done with most happy skill. "Proud Maisie is in the Wood" is a f

attle of Otterburn," "The Hunting of the Cheviot," "Johnnie Armstrong," "Kinmont Willie," "The Rising in the North" and "Northumberland Betrayed by Douglas." Of the fictitious class, some were shortened, popularized, and generally degraded versions of the chivalry romances, which were passing out of favor among educated readers in the sixteenth century and fell into the hands of the ballad-makers. Such, to name only a few

who has been killed by the Jew's daughter and thrown into Our Lady's draw-well fifty fathom deep, and the boy answers his mother miraculously from the well.[16] Birds carry messages for lovers[17] and dying men,[18] or show the place where the body lies buried and the corpse-candles shine.[19] The harper strings his harp with three golden hairs of the drowned maiden, and the tune that he plays upon them reveals the secret of her death.[20] The ghosts of the sons that have perished at sea come hom

d fear find an elementary force of utterance. Love is strong as death, jealousy cr

en forsters at

am where

rop of thy

e the fords

did my mot

she cr

I was to tr

h I was t

asks her bu

room at your

ny room at

m at your

fain would I

aly, but l

me while it

is auld it

a' like morn

my young ba

on the nur

l' were de

n grass grow

and wandering gleemen go about in it. The knight stands at his garden pale, the lady sits at her bower window, and the little foot page carries messages over moss and moor. Marchmen are riding through the Bateable Land "by the hie light o' the moon." Monks are chanting in St. Mary's Kirk, trumpets are blowing in Carlisle town, castles are burning; down in the glen there is an ambush and swords are flashing; bow

o identify him with one of the dispossessed followers of Simon de Montfort, in "the Barons' War," or with some still earlier free-booter, of Hereward's time, who had taken to the woods and lived by plundering the Normans. Myth as he is, he is a thoroughly national conception. He had the English love of fair play; the English readiness to shake hands and make up when worsted in a square fight. He killed the King's venison, but was a loyal subject. He took from the rich and gave to the poor, executing thus a kind of wild justice. He defied legal authority in the person of the proud sheriff of Nottingham, thereby appealing to that s

hen the shaw

be large

mery in fe

the foul

dere draw t

the hil

hem in the

grene-wode

old English ballads, and a particular pleasure in the reading of them. I can affirm the same of Mr. Dryden." Dryden's "Miscellany Poems" (1684) gave "Gilderoy," "Johnnie Armstrong," "Chevy Chase," "The Miller and the King's Daughter," and "Little Musgrave and the Lady Barnard." The last named, as well as "Lady Anne Bothwell's Lament" and "Fair Margaret and Sweet William,"[34] was quoted in Beaumont and Fletcher's "Knight of the Burning Pestle," (1611). Scraps of them are sung by one of the dramatis personae, old Merrythought, whose speciality is a damnable iteration of ballad fragments. References to old ballads are numerous in the Elizabethan plays. Percy devoted the second book of his first series to "Ballads that Illustrate Shakspere." In the seventeenth century a few ballads were printed entire in poetic miscellanies entitled "Garlands," higgledy-piggledy with pieces of all kinds. Professor Child enumerat

titution of the country in which the poet writes. Homer and Virgil have formed their plans in this view." Accordingly he thinks that the author of "Chevy Chase" meant to point a moral as to the mischiefs of private war. As if it were not precisely the gaudium certaminis that inspired the old border ballad-maker! As if he did not glory in the fight! The passage where Earl Percy took the dead Douglas by the hand and lamented his fallen foe reminds Addison of Aeneas' behavior toward Lausus. The robin red-breast covering the children with leaves recalls to his mind a similar touch in one of Horace's odes. But it was much that Addison, whose own verse was so artificial, should have had a taste for the wild graces of folk-song. He was seve

e editor, had said a good word for ballad

aste despise t

ding ballads

ble ancient

tch above our mo

y be more refi

ined in verse, we

shuffling doubl

omely, but their h

stic force they

d nature made a

ld that the poem called 'Hardicanute' (which I always admired and still admire) was the work of somebody that lived a few years ago. This I do not at all believe, though it has evidently been retouched by some modern hand." Before Percy no concerted or intelligent effort had been made

hat his guest "chose for his regular reading the old Spanish romance of 'Felixmarte of Hircania,' in folio, which he read quite through." He adds, what one would not readily suspect, that the doctor, when a boy, "was immoderately fond of reading romances of chivalry, and he retained his fondness for them through life. . . I have heard him attribute to these extravagant fictions that unsettled turn of mind which prevented his ever fixing in any profession." Percy talked over his project with Johnson, who would seem to have given his approval, and even to have added his pe

offered to show me a copy of 'The Children in the Wood,' which he firmly believed to be of the first edition, and by the help of which the text might be freed from several corruptions, if this age of barbarity had any claim to such favors from him." "The conversation,"

infant, me

wn upon

ok up the sq

he child sq

ag

y hat up

d into th

I met an

was in h

orth,[36] who compares i

n in th

babes, with

ering up

more they

ng from t

abashed by the ridicule flung upon his labors . . . that, though while he was writing under a mask he had not wanted resolution to follow his genius into the regions of true simplicity and genuine pathos (as is evinced by the exquisite ballad of 'Sir Cauline' and by many other pieces), yet when he appeared in his own person and character as a poetical writer, he adopted, as in the tale of 'The Hermit of Warkworth,' a diction scarcely di

re thirty-nine lines here. There are two hundred in the thing called the 'Child of Elle' in the 'Reliques.' But in those two hundred lines all the thirty-nine originals do not appear. . . On the whole, the union of the genuine and the false-of the old ballad with Percy's tawdry feebleness-makes about as objectionable a mésalliance as in the story itself is in the eyes of the father."[37] The modern ballad scholars, in their zeal for the purity of the text, are almost as ha

unfair to try Percy by modern editorial canons. That sacredness which is now imputed to the ipsissima verba of an ancient piece of popular literature would have been unintelligible to men of that generation, who regarded such things as trifles at best, and mostly as barbarous trifles-something like wampum belts, or nose-rings, or antique ornaments in the go?t barbare et charmant des bijoux goths. Percy's readers did not want torsos and scraps; to presen

as Warton and many others. But the nucleus of the whole was a certain folio manuscript in a handwriting of Charles I.'s time, containing 191 songs and ballads, which Percy had begged, then still very young, from his friend Humphrey Pitt, of Prior's-Lee in Shropshire. When he first saw this precious document, it was torn, unbound, and mutilated, "lying dirty on the floor under a bureau in the parlor, being used by t

y one of Percy's daughters-to print 'The Grene Knight,' 'The Carle of Carlisle' and 'The Turk and Gawin' in his 'Syr Gawaine' for the Bannatyne Club, 1839." Percy was furiously assailed by Joseph Ritson for manipulating his texts; and in the 1794 edition he made some concessions to the latter's demand for a literal rescript, by taking off a few of the ornaments in which he had tricked them. Ritson was a thoroughly critical, conscientious student of poetic antiquities and held the right theory of an editor's functions. In his own collection of early English poetry he rendered a valuable service to all later inquiries. These included "Pieces of Ancient Popular Poetry," 1791; "Ancient Songs," 1792; "Scottish Songs," 1794; "Robin Hood," 1795; besides editions of Laurence Minot's poems, and of "Gammer Gurton's Needle," as well as ot

e for the want of higher beauties." Indeed how should it have been otherwise? The old ballads were everything which the eighteenth century was not. They were rough and wild, where that was smooth and tame; they dealt, with fierce sincerity, in the elementary passions of human nature. They did not moralize, or philosophize, or sentimentalize; were never subtle, intellect

ll as feeling, unequaled by anything in our medieval poetry outside of Chaucer; unequal

ethers that

-blood they w

crowing a m

wild fule

f Heaven wi

I'll be miss

were an ea

an elf

gie my si

rd that y

ae napkin

r in t

ipe the tri

as they d

with one chy

stir at

green, it is

was too

ved them, himself, in their native simplicity, and it seems almost incredible that he could have spoken as he did about Prior's insipid paraphrase of the "Nut Brown Maid." "If it had no other merit," he says of that most lovely ballad, "than the having afforded the ground-work to Prior's 'Henry and Emma,' this ought to p

t is this wo

ngeth as

's day in

d before

say farewel

rte not

so? Wheder

at have

fare to sor

ange if y

inde, of al

but you

h his Venus and fla

iss that change

e that darkens

passion, if u

Emma's joy, i

! be pain, th

figure and no

oman felt, nor f

h long have in

ove himself

ge and dread an

t of stores a

coldly to s

d at least my

h shall my en

ght shall inte

ry shall with

ference of the

banishment s

Emma sleeps o

d, where'er tho

pain and partn

t fair Venu

ankind, will lov

the plethora from which English poetic diction was sufferin

Lovelace, Suckling, Drayton, Beaumont and Fletcher, Wotton, and other well-known poets. Of the modern ballads the only one with any resemblance to folk-poetry was "The Braes o' Yarrow" by William Hamilton of Bangour, a Scotch gentleman who was "out in the forty-five." The famous border stream had watered an anci

k ye, my bonn

k ye, my win

arrow Unvisited," as well as

irk, green grows, g

arrow's ban

the apple f

ave of Yarr

Orders Grey," a short, narrative ballad made up of song snatches from Shakspere's plays. Later ed

those of our own country and those of Spain escaped the same fate. There is, indeed, little doubt that oblivion covers many English songs equal to any that were published by Bishop Percy; and many Spanish songs as good as the best of those which have been so happily translated by Mr. Lockhart. Eighty years ago England possessed only one tattered copy of 'Child Waters' and 'Sir Cauline,' and S

and to inspire men of original genius. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Scott, all acknowledged the greatest obligations to them. Wordsworth said that English poetry had been "absolutely redeemed" by them. "I do not think there is a writer in verse of the present day who would not be proud to acknowledge his obligations to the 'Reliques.' I know that it is so with my friends; and, for myself, I am happy that it is so with my friends; and, for myself, I am

ragon'

agic

covet for my

ballad was the power of sincerity

n I have mentioned. The summer day sped onward so fast that, notwithstanding the sharp appetite of thirteen, I forgot the hour of dinner, was sought for with anxiety, and was still found entranced in my intellectual banquet. To read and to remember was, in this instance, the same thing; and henceforth I overwhe

ung"), "The Friar of Orders Grey" ("Graurock"), "The Wanton Wife of Bath" ("Frau Schnips"), "King John and the Abbot of Canterbury" ("Der Kaiser und der Abt"), and "Child Waters" ("Graf Walter"). A. W. Schlegel says that Burger did not select the more ancient and genuine pieces in the "Reliques"; and, moreover, that he spoiled the simplicity of the originals in his translations. It was doubtless in part the success of the "Reliques" that is answerable for many collections of old English poetry put

izabeth Percy, Countess of Northumberland. Himself the son of a grocer, he liked to think that he was connected by blood with the great northern house whose exploits had been sung by

was fond of music and of nature, and was easily moved to rears; had "a young girl's nerves," says Taine, "and an old maid's hobbies." Gray, who met him in 1765, when on a visit to the Earl of Strathmore at Glammis Castle, esteemed him highly. So did Dr. Johnson, partly because of his "Essay on Truth" (1770), a shallow invective against Hume, which gained its author an interview with George III. and a pension of two hundred pounds a year. Beattie visited London in 1771, and figured there as a champion of orthodoxy and a heaven-inspired bard. Mrs. Montagu patronized him extensively. Sir Joshua Reynolds painted his portrait, with his "Essay on Truth" under his arm, and Truth itself in the background, an allegoric angel holding the balances in one hand, and thrusting away with the other t

who "lived in Gothic days." But nothing less truly Gothic or medieval could easily be imagined than the actual process

es make and

unce, and wel pu

em, indeed, is properly the education of nature; and in a way it anticipates Wordsworth's "Prelude," as this hoary sage does the "Solitary" of "The Excursion." Beattie justifies his use of Spenser's stanza on the ground that it "seems, from its Gothi

g-sounding cu

oud lament th

lighted by th

stening, wandere

dream of graves

to the charnel

th of clanking

by the owl's

ks by fits the shud

ettling moon,

dark and mel

eam, remote fr

ore their revel

ancy rove at la

ght to his en

ldly murmuring

inging ear; the

s gleam, illumed

w a portal's

mpet bids the

st of little w

amond lance and

gentle, their

elms, and green t

there, right

instrels wake th

w breath the martia

nst luxury and ambition, and the praise of simplicity and innocence. The titles alone of Beattie's minor poems are enough to show in what school he was a scholar: "The

on, "Danmarks Gamle Folkeviser," was

Popular Ballads," issued in ten parts in 1882-

h?user legend an

ife of Ush

ten poem, but a song and dance. Many of the old tunes are preserved. A number are given in Chappell's "Pop

s these meaningless refrains as re

moderns. See them parodied in Robert

o roar and s

he lot of

y, as he re

hts from th

and yet it is sung but by some blind crouder, with no rougher voice than rude style; which being so evil apparel

Bonnie Georg

Lord R

: "The Tw

ballad the poet, the individual artist, is present, though the precise ration of his agency to the communal element in the work is obscure. For an acu

hinvar" is derived from "Katherine Janfarie

oral is drawn, far less any conscious analysis of feeling attempted: the pathetic meaning is left to be suggested by the mere presentment of the situation. Inexperienced c

in Hood risks his life to take the s

Cf. Chaucer's "

he Gay

Johnni

oung Hu

he Twa

Wife of Us

rgaret and Sw

et Willia

Clerk

illie's

Owyne" an

King E

Johnni

ary Ham

et Willia

saken Bride."

old as when t

rkes

-like Prince Hal-who breaks his own laws, and t

n Hood and

t claim to the authorship of this ballad, see Appendix

ife of

cond edition of th

. II. Introductory Essay by J. W. Hales on "The Re

] I

ement to the F

ur volumes

mselves upon. Ritson's particular vanity was the past participle of verb

unting of t

et Willia

"Tam

Fair A

Child

English Romantic M

eface to the 2nd editio

Peter

hichte der Deutsche

Fair Margaret and Sweet William," "Sweet William's Ghost," "The Nut-Brown Maid," "The Jew's Daughter," etc., etc.; but none of the Robin Hood ballads. Herder's preface testifies that the "Reliques" was the starting-point and the kernel of his whole undertaking. "Der Anblick dieser Sammlung giebts offenbar dass ich eigentli

ballad literature in general and to "The Nut-Brown

I. stanz