Or

About the dead hour o' the night
She heard the bridles ring.

It can sing low:

(Tam Lin)

Then up bespake the bride's mother-
She never was known to speak so free-
"Ye'll not forsake my only daughter
Though Susie Pye has crossed the sea."

Or

(Young Beichan)

An' thou sall marry a proud gunner;
An' a proud gunner I'm sure he'll be.

It can gallop:

(The Great Silkie)

O there was horsing, horsing in haste
And cracking of whips out owre the lee.
(Archie of Cawfield)

Or it can be merely flat pedestrianism:

There was slayne upon the Scottès' side
For sooth as I you say,

Of four and fifty thousand Scottes

Went but eighteen away.

(Otterburn)

But always it is unmistakable, and like no other thing

in poetry.

III

Now as we study this peculiar unmistakable note, one or two things become clear to us.

It becomes clear, in the first place, that whether or not these ballads "wrote themselves" (as Grimm put it)—whether or not they were written by the people, as they certainly were for the people-it is no accident of chance or of time that withholds from us all knowledge of the authorship. We discern that somehow anonymity belongs to their very nature; that anonymity, impersonality, permeates their form and substance. Let me apply a test which I have applied elsewhere. If any known man ever steeped himself in balladry, that man was Sir Walter Scott, and once or twice, in Proud Maisie and Brignall Banks, he came near to distil the essence. If any man, taking the Ballad for his model, has ever sublimated its feeling and language in a poem

seraphically free

From taint of personality,

that man was Coleridge, and that poem The Ancient Mariner. If any writer today alive can be called a ballad-writer of genius, it is the author of Danny Deever and East and West. But suppose a bundle of most carefully selected ballads by Scott, Coleridge, Kipling, bound up in a volume with such things as Clerk Saunders, Cospatrick, Robin Hood and the Monk,—you feel (do you not?)—you know-they would intrude almost, though not quite, as obviously as would a ballad of Rossetti's or one from Morris's Defence of Guinevere.

Now we must never forget that the old ballads have come down to us orally, after centuries of transmission through the memories of simple people who never

thought of them as "literature"; that in fact, barring the broadsides, they never were "literature" or written speech at all, until Bishop Percy in 1765 started apologetically to make them literature. And so I have sometimes fancied that the impress of their authorship may merely have worn away as the impress on a shilling wears away after years of transference from pocket to pocket. There is something in this; and there is more in it when we remind ourselves that a ballad written on one memorable event will often have been recast and refurbished to commemorate another. Let me illustrate this from the fortunes of a beautiful one, The Queen's Marie. You all know it:

When she cam to the Netherbow port,
She laugh'd loud laughters three;
But when she cam to the gallows foot
The tears blinded her e'e.

"Yestreen the Queen had four Maries,
The night she'll hae but three;

There was Marie Seaton, and Marie Beaton,
And Marie Carmichael, and me.

"O little did my mother ken,
The day she cradled me,
The lands I was to travel in,

Or the dog's death I wad d'ee!"

Now Professor Child collected and printed some twenty-eight variants and fragments of this balladwhich is a somewhat late one, if its story can be traced no farther back than 1563 Then, or about then, Mary Queen of Scots had four Maries among her gentlewomen-Mary Seaton, Mary Beaton, Mary Fleming

and Mary Livingstone: and Knox, in his History of the Reformation, relates a tragic scandal, involving the queen's apothecary and "a Frenchwoman that served in the Queen's bedchamber." This is substantially the story told in the ballad; which, however, in most versions makes the king himself ("the highest Stewart of a'") to be the male sinner. But why Mary Carmichael and Mary Hamilton in place of Mary Fleming and Mary Livingstone? Well, we must travel to Russia for it. There, after the marriage of one of the ministers of Peter the Great's father with a Hamilton, that Scottish family ranked with the Russian aristocracy. The Czar Peter was punctilious that all his Empress Catharine's maids-of-honour should be remarkable for good looks; a niece of the minister's wife, a Mary Hamilton, was appointed for her extreme beauty. There followed an amour with one Orloff, an aide-decamp to the Czar: a murdered babe was found, the guilt traced to Mary. Orloff was arrested but subsequently reprieved or pardoned. Mary Hamilton suffered execution, on March 14, 1719.

Here, then, we have a story almost precisely similar to that of the ballad; with a real Mary Hamilton, who does not occur historically in the scandal of 1563. Her date is 1719: and yet no one with the smallest sense of poetry can put the ballad so late, or anywhere within a hundred years of 1719. Obviously the old ballad was re-adapted to fit a new scandal in high life. But, mark yet again, the stanza about the four Maries is merely incidental and has nothing to do with the scandal: and as that kind of scandal has been common enough in courts from very early times, there is no reason why the ballad should not reach back to very early times, have been adapted to the business of 1563 and re-adapted to

the business of 1719. Speculation, to be sure!-But that is where you always are with ballads.

Yet-no! Our simile of the shilling worn in passing from pocket to pocket, will not do. For it is not only that the more a ballad suffers wear and change the more it remains the same thing: it is that the more it wears, the more it takes that paradoxically sharp impress, the impress of impersonality.

IV

The next point to be noted of the Ballad is its extraordinary rapidity of movement. Rapidity of movement has been preached of the epic by Horace, and by Matthew Arnold specially commended in Homer. But, for rapidity, these innominate lays beat anything in Homer. I remember studying, once on a time, a treatise on American cocktails and coming on the following rider to a recipe for a mixed liquor entitled Angler's Punch"N. B. This punch can also be put up in bottles, so that the Angler may lose no time."

Now the true Ballad is put up (doubtless upon experience) so that the audience loses no time:

The king sits in Dunfermline town
Drinking the blude-red wine;

and forthwith he asks

"O whare will I get a skeely skipper
To sail this new ship o' mine?"

And "What, Professor Ker very pertinently asks, "What would the story of Sir Patrick Spens be worth if it was told in any other way-with a description of the