Where many a ship doth rest with toppe-royall.

O, towne of townes! patrone and not compare, London, thou art the floure of Cities all.

My discourse, like many a better one, shall end with a moral. I have often observed in life, and especially in matters of education—you too, doubtless, have observed that what folks get cheaply or for nothing they are disposed to undervalue. Indeed I suspect we all like to think ourselves clever, and it helps our sense of being clever to adjust the worth of a thing to the price we have paid for it. Now the medieval scholar I have been trying to depict for you was poor, even bitterly poor, yet bought his learning dear. Listen to Chaucer's account of him when he had attained to be a Clerk of Oxenford, and to enough money to hire a horse:

As leene was his hors as is a rake,
And he nas nat right fat, I undertake,
But looked holwe, and ther-to sobrely;
Ful thredbare was his overeste courtepy;
For he hadde geten hym yet no benefice,
Ne was so worldly for to have office;
For hym was levere have at his beddes heed
Twenty bookes clad in blak or reed

Of Aristotle and his philosophie,

Than robės riche, or fithele, or gay sautrie:
But al be that he was a philosophre,

Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre;

But al that he myghte of his freendes hente
On bookes and his lernynge he it spente,

And bisily gan for the soulės preye

Of hem that yaf hym wher-with to scoleye.

How happy would such a poor scholar deem us, who have printed books cheap and plenty, who have news

papers brought to our door for a groat, who can get in less than an hour and a half to Oxford, to Cambridge, in a very few hours to Paris, to Rome-cities of his desire, shining in a land that is very far off! Nevertheless I tell you, who have listened so kindly to me for an hour, that in the commerce and transmission of thought the true carrier is neither the linotype machine, nor the telegraph at the nearest post office, nor the telephone at your elbow, nor any such invented convenience: but even such a wind as carries the seed, "it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain": the old, subtle, winding, caressing, omnipresent wind of man's aspiration. For the secret-which is also the reward—of all learning lies in the passion for the search.

THE

BALLADS

I

"HE Ballad is, of all forms of poetry, about the most mysterious and singular: singular in its nature, mysterious not only in this but in its origin and its history.

We need not, here, today, trouble ourselves overmuch with its origin, which is much the same as Melchizedek's. Yet we may not wholly neglect the question. There are, as you probably know, two conflicting theories about it; and the supporters of each talk like men ready to shed blood, though for my part I hold that a very little common sense might reconcile them; since each theory contains a modicum of truth, and each, when pushed to the extreme, becomes frantically absurd.

On the one hand we have the theory-invented or pioneered by Herder, elaborated and oracularly preached by James Grimm—that these "folk songs" were made by the "folk"; that they burst into existence by a kind of natural and spontaneous generation in a tribe or nation, at that stage of culture when it is “for all practical purposes an individual"; that a ballad comes, or came, into being much as the floating matter of a nebula condenses to form a star.

Now there is much truth in this. A tribe meets together to celebrate some occasion of common interest

a successful hunt, a prosperous foray, the wedding of its chief, the return of the god who brings summer, the end of a religious fast, a harvest home. As Professor Kittredge puts it in his Introduction to the abridgement of Child's great collection of Ballads:

The object of the meeting is known to all; the deeds which are to be sung, the dance which is to accompany and illustrate the singing, are likewise familiar to everyone. There is no such diversity of intellectual interests as characterises even the smallest company of civilised men. There is unity of feeling and a common stock, however slender, of ideas and traditions. The dancing and singing, in which all share, are so closely related as to be practically complementary parts of a single festal act. . . . And this is no fancy picture. It is the soberest kind of science, a mere brief chapter of descriptive anthropology, for which authorities might be cited without number.

Let me add that all this rests on the early discovery of man that all manual or bodily labour is enormously increased in effect, when timed to rhymth. So a regiment marches to a band; so the tramp of a column crossing a light bridge has to be broken lest the timed impact wreck the structure; so in the Peninsular War a British regiment heaved down a wall apparently immovable, by lining against it and applying bodily pressure in successive rhythmical waves. So I, who have lived most of my life over a harbour, have seen and heard crews weighing anchor at windlass or capstan, or hauling on ropes, to a sailors' chanty, the solo-man intoning

We have a good ship and a jolly good crew!

the chorus taking him up

And away, away Rio!

So also as we saw in one of the lectures last term-the children in our streets help out dance with song in such primitive games as "Sally, Sally Waters," "Here come three Dukes a-riding," or

London Bridge is broken down,
Dance over, my Lady Lee!

The "nebular" theorists have etymology, too, on their side, for what it is worth. Undoubtedly "ballad" comes from the late Latin verb ballare "to dance," and should mean a song accompanied by dancing. Undoubtedly some old ballads with their refrains are referable to that origin-the famous old one of Binnorie, for example, with its chorus:

There were twa sisters sat in a bour;

Binnorie, O Binnorie!

There cam a knight to be their wooer,
By the bonnie milldams o' Binnorie.

But this only applies to some ballads, and these a few. The theory, pushed to cover all, exposes its absurdity in Grimm's famous phrase "das Volk dichtet."

That let in Schlegel, who at first had nibbled at Grimm's theory; as it lets in all those who maintain (and I think incontrovertibly) that, after all, in the end a ballad must be composed by somebody; and if you think a ballad can be composed by public meeting, just call a public meeting and try! In human experience poetry doesn't get written in that way: it requires an author. Moreover these ballads, as they come down to us, though overlaid by improvements by Tom, Dick and Harry, are things of genius, individual. As for etymology, if balada be the origin of ballad, so is it of the