other fees) paying twenty shillings to the English curate, shall get the corpse of the deceased to be buried within the church, yea often even under the pulpit-foot; and for lucre interred in God's sanctuary when dead, who, when alive, would never approach nor enter the gates of Sion, to worshipe the Lord, nor conforme themselves to true religion. Truely such, and the like abuses, and evill examples of lewd lives, have beene the greatest hinderance of that land's conversion; for such, like wolves, have been from time to time but stumbling-blocks before them; regarding more their own sensuall and licentious ends, than the glory of God, in converting of one soul unto his church. Now as concerning the unconscionable carriage of the Hybernian clergy, ask mee, and there my reply. As many of them (for the most part) as are Protestant ministers have their wives, children, and servants invested Papists; and many of these church-men at the houre of their death, like dogges return back to their former vomit. Witness the late Viccar of Calin (belonging to the late and last Richard Earl of Desmond, who being on his deathbed, and having two hundred pounds a-year; finding him selfe to forsake both life and stipend, sent straight for a Romish priest, and received the Papall sacrament: confessing freely in my audience that he had been a Romane Catholick all his life, dissembling onely with his religion for the better maintaining of his wife and children. And being brought to his burial place, he was interred in the church, with which he had played the ruffian all his life; being openly carried at mid-day with Jesuits, priests, and friers of his own nation, and after a contemptible in derision of our profession and lawes of the manner, kingdom. Elsewhere in his travels he has described the Caramins as a tribe of savage Lybians in the north of Africa; hence Lybian applied to the Irish clergy is uncomplimentary. And in his sojourn in Poland, he has explained what the inhabitants of the province of Podolia had suffered from their next neighbours, the heathen Tartars. Wood-carnes, wild Irish kernes. John Barclay, author of the Argenis, was born in 1582, at Pont-à-Mousson, in Lorraine, where his father, a Scotsman, was professor of Law. Owing, it is said, to persecution on the part of the Jesuits, he came with his father to England about 1603, and either in that year or two years later he published his Euphormionis Satyricon, a politicosatirical romance, chiefly directed against the Jesuits, supplements to which were the second part (1607), the Apologia (1611), and the Icon Animorum (1614). In 1616 he left England and went to Rome, where he died, a good Catholic, in 1621. In the same year appeared his Argenis, according to Cowper 'the best romance that ever was written.' It was written in Latin, and was translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Polish, &c. There are three English versions, besides one entered at Stationers' Hall by Ben Jonson in 1623, but never published. The first published was by Le Grys and May in 1628; the last was by Clara Reeve in 1772. It resembles the Arcadia in its romantic adventures, the Utopia in its discussion of political problems, and, a seventeenth-century roman à clef, under disguised names and circumstances reviews the events and personages of European history during the later half of the sixteenth century. The story of the loves of Polyarchus and Argenis is really a political allegory, containing clever allusions to the state of Europe, more particularly of France during the time of the League; to Queen Elizabeth, Henri IV., and Philip II. It influenced Fénelon's Télémaque, may be said to have led the way to Calprenède, Scudéry, and Madame de la Fayette, and has merited the admiration of readers as dissimilar as Richelieu, Leibnitz, and Coleridge. See Dupond, L'Argén's de Barclai (1875). Arthur Johnston (or JONSTON, Latinised Jonstonus; c. 1587-1641), remarkable among Scotsmen, along with George Buchanan, as a writer of Latin poetry who attained to European reputation. Born at Caskieben, near Aberdeen, he studied at Aberdeen, graduated in medicine at Padua (1610), and resided for about twenty years in France. On his return to Britain he obtained the patronage of Archbishop Laud, was appointed physician to Charles I., and became rector of King's College, Aberdeen. He wrote Latin elegies and epigrams, a paraphrase of the Song of Solomon, a collection of short poems (published in 1637) entitled Musæ Aulica, and (his greatest work) a complete version of the Psalms. He also edited and contributed to the Delicia Poetarum Scotorum, Latin poems by various Scottish authors. In Hallam's opinion: 'The Scots certainly wrote Latin with a good ear and considerable elegance of phrase. . . . I am inclined to think that Johnston's Psalms, all of which are in elegiac metre, do not fall short of those of Buchanan, either in elegance of style or correctness of Latinity.' Sir William Geddes is content to rank Johnston after, but close to, his great countryman. Editing a collection of the writers of Latin verse in Aberdeen, especially during the reigns of James I. and Charles I.-'the period when such verse was in Scotland the normal and recognised vehicle of poetic expression'-Sir William accounts Johnston as foremost 'of a cultured group of scholars such as no other city in Scotland, or even in the British Isles, could match at the period when they appeared.' Principal Sir William Geddes edited a magnificent edition of the works of Johnston for the New Spalding Club (2 vols. 4to, 1892-95, in the Musa Latina Aberdonensis). THE BALLADS:* BALLAD is, in ordinary use, a term for any narrative poem, usually in the simple measure of which a notable example is : Lord William was buried in St Mary's kirk, Lady Margret in Mary's quire; Out o' the lady's grave grew a bonny red rose, And out o' the knight's a briar. Such poems may be written in the most civilised ages, by the most cultivated authors-by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, or Sir Charles Hanbury Williams. But these and similar compositions are mere mimicries of what is more technically styled the ballad-the narrative Volks-lied, or popular tale in verse. Every Volks-lied, of course, or traditional poem is not a narrative ballad; it may be a personal lyric, or a begging song (quête), as in our songs of the Hogmanay season, the ancient Rhodian swallow song, and many French examples. The word 'ballad,' then, is here used for a traditional and popular narrative poem, usually of unknown authorship. The sources whence we derive the Scottish and English ballads may be either printed books, or broadsheets, or manuscripts, or oral tradition. Very old printed sources of certain ballads exist. 'A Gest of Robyn Hode' may be 'anywhere from 1492 to 1534, the year of the death of Wynkyn de Worde,' the printer. Even after the renovations of printers and reciters, 'a considerable number of Middle English forms remain,' and Professor Child conceived that the little epic' may have been 'put together' (out of ballads) 'as early as 1400, or before. There are no firm grounds on which to base an opinion.' Nothing is certainly known as to the date of Robin Hood himself, if he was a real character. In Piers Plowman (c. 1377) Sloth says that he knows rhymes of Robin Hood better than his paternoster. It is not, then, perhaps, too arbitrary to regard Robin Hood ballads as a popular genre, and of considerable antiquity, in the middle of the fourteenth century, though the ballads as extant are later. Printed as early as the end of the fifteenth century, ballads continued to be published and hawked about, as by Shakespeare's Autolycus, to clowns who loved ballads but even too well.' Many of these would be modern, things written on public events and prodigies by persons of the lowest literary standing. Others would be really ancient traditional ballads, of unknown date and authorship. Collections of the broadsheets were made by amateurs, as by Mr Pepys ; and there were manuscript collections, such as the famous folio edited with elegance by Bishop Percy, and with accuracy by Mr Furnivall. The eighteenth century saw the collections of Allan Ramsay, Herd, Pinkerton, and others (the editors often altering at will, except Ritson and, probably, Herd); while the nineteenth century opened with Scott's Border Minstrelsy, followed by Motherwell, Buchan, Jamieson, Kinloch, and others. Foreign savants have also made vast collections in almost every European land, and to these have been added gatherings out of Asiatic and savage regions. The authorship of the traditional ballads has been matter of controversy. The present writer's contribution on ballads to the Encyclopædia Bri tannica was written in 1875, and has been criticised by Mr T. F. Henderson in Scottish Vernacular Literature (1898). Space does not afford room for a reply, nor is it necessary to specify the modifications which are here made in the older statement. We must begin by discriminating between at least three classes: (1) The historical ballads of relatively modern date, such as 'The Bonny Earl o' Moray' and 'The Queen's Marie,' which cannot be earlier than the reigns of James VI. and Mary Stuart respectively. (2) Such ballads as 'The Boy and the Mantle,' 'King Arthur and King Cornwall,' and 'The Marriage of Sir Gawain.' Concerning these, Professor Child says that they are clearly not of the same rise, and not meant for the same ears, as' the ballads in his first volume. They would come down by professional rather than domestic tradition, through minstrels rather than knitters and weavers.' Thus Professor Child distinguishes between ballads chanted by professional minstrels and ballads chanted by the populace for the populace. As to the authorship of the ballads of professional minstrels, it was more or less literary. 'The Boy and the Mantle' implies knowledge of a romance extant in three MSS. of the thirteenth century, a piece translated into Norse prose in 1217-63. The data occur in Perceval le Gallois' of the second half of the twelfth century, and also in the Welsh Triads. These data, briefly, are magical tests of chastity; and one of them is as old as an Egyptian popular tale recounted by Herodotus (i. III. Such magical tests are, of course, in origin purely popular, or even savage, but the setting and circumstances of this ballad are literary, being directly derived from the early mediæval Arthurian romances. From the same sources, and with adaptations from a chanson de geste of Charlemagne's voyage to Jerusalem, come 'Sir Gawain's Marriage' and 'King Arthur and King Cornwall.' There are, in these pieces, popular data of worldwide diffusion, such as impossible feats to be performed under peril of death, but the source of the ballads, as they stand, is literary: they are based * Copyright 1901 by J. B. Lippincott Company, to the fourth paragraph on page 524, beginning "Several ballads,” etc. on romances widely circulated in manuscript. Some lowly professional minstrel was doubtless the author of ballads in this category. The third class is more puzzling it is the large class of traditional ballad narrative poems, such as 'The Elfin Knight,' 'Riddles,' 'Willie's Lady,' 'Young Tamlane,' and very many others. Professor Child does not attribute the diffusion of these to professional minstrels; and their data are popular, and underived (as in the second class) from known romances. What marks them as popular is their wonderfully wide diffusion, their close resemblance to prose Märchen (which are found all over the world, and are certainly not of literary authorship), with their folklore incidents, based on universal superstitions and customs. Despite their general uniformity and common character, these ballads occur in numerous variants, fragments of one being embedded in another, after the manner of Märchen, so that it is not possible to discover any one absolutely original form and type. This is the natural result of centuries of oral tradition; reciters had omitted, altered, transposed, modified, and modernised the language; introduced modern details of weapons, costume, and the like. Consequently, though there must have been an original author-literary or popular, amateur or professional-of each ballad, his date and name and condition remain unknown these ballads as they exist are popular patchwork. As they exist they are the work of this, that, and the other maker and reciter : things fashioned by men of the people for the people, and by the people altered into scores of variants. In some cases a prose tale has been versified; in others, fragments of prose alternating with verse leave dubious the original shape, whether verse or prose, or a medley of both, as in Aucassin and Nicolete,' and in many East African ballad-stories (see Motherwell; 'Young Beichan and Susy Pie,' Minstrelsy, 1827, p. 15; and Steere's Swahili Tales, 1870, p. 7). It is in this sense that the so-called 'communistic ' source of certain ballads is to be understood; in this sense they were made by the people, for the people.' They stand on much the same footing as the Märchen or popular tales of the world; to which no one dreams of assigning a professional or literary origin, for they are found in countries where there is no literature and no class of professional narrators or poets. From these tales the ballads only vary by the vehicle of verse. The date when they were first circulated in one kind of verse or another is not to be ascertained, though the familiar ballad measure is not certainly known to be older than the early fifteenth century. The objection that the people does not versify applies only to the modern populace of civilised Europe. Mr Henderson says that the heart of the people . . . is now, and probably ever was, wholly untrained in the art of poetical expression.' This opinion is based on neglect of popular and savage literature. That the people does compose in poetry, from the Australian, African, and American tribes to the Gypsies of Spain and the Finns, is matter of indisputable certainty. The sagas prove the same fact for the Scandinavian race; and very old French writers speak of purely popular ditties on Roland. That the peasantry of early medieval Scotland and England were incapable of what the peasants of modern Greece can do, or could do at the time of the War of Independence, it is hard to believe. They certainly preserved, recited, altered, mingled, and modernised ballads which are full of universal popular ideas and situations-ballads which are merely popular Märchen in rhyme. These processes of popular alteration and combination lasted, historically, at least till the end of the seventeenth century, as is proved by the numerous variants of the 'Queen's Marie,' based, with great departure from fact, on an historical incident of 1563. It is true that Professor Child regarded this as one of the latest of all ballads, and based, not on a tragedy of the court of Mary Stuart, but on an event of 1719 at the court of Peter the Great. The present writer, by arguments published in Blackwood's Magazine (vol. clviii.), was fortunate enough to alter Professor Child's theory, as he was so kind as to state in a private letter. Mr Henderson also accepts (as regards the date and place of the events out of which this ballad arose) the arguments which thus influenced Professor Child. The theory of the large popular share in the origin and development of many ballads has its adversary in the hypothesis that most ballads are degraded adaptations, by professional minstrels, of literary chansons de geste (heroic early mediæval French epics) and of literary lays and romances. Scott himself wrote, as regards 'Lord Thomas and Fair Annie,' that, in his opinion, 'the further our researches are extended, the more we shall see ground to believe that the romantic ballads of later times are, for the most part, abridgments of the ancient metrical romances, narrated in a smoother stanza and a more modern language.' This corresponds with Scott's theory that Märchen are the residuum of higher and more literary myths, whereas many myths are Märchen organised and decorated by literary art, as in the Odyssey and the Argonautica. Akin to Scott's is the view of Professor Courthope, who writes, in his History of English Poetry (i. 445): ‘A vague idea prevails that, as the ballad is before all things popular in its character, it was evolved in some mysterious way out of the genius and traditions of the people themselves. But this was by no means the case. What the people contributed to the making of the ballads was no more than the taste and sentiment which characterise them.' And that is conceding a great deal. Mr Henderson says: 'In many ways the ballads bring us into immediate contact with the antique, pagan, savage, superstitious, elemental characteristics of our race.' If these characteristics are not 'popular,' not 'primitive,' what can be called primitive and popular? But Mr Henderson seems to regard these characteristics as merely carried on from 'old forgotten romances,' which (though certainly composed by men of letters in full mediæval Christianity) somehow 'embalm the sentiments, passions, beliefs, forms of thought, and imaginative wonder and dread of our pagan ancestors.' What romances do all this? To do this is the function of the Folk, not of mediæval romancers. Mr Courthope goes on 'They preserved them, it is true, in their memories, after they had been composed, but the matter not less than the form of the poem was, as a rule, furnished exclusively by the minstrel, who adapted the ancient traditions of the art, originally intended to please the tribal chieftain, or the feudal lord, to the temper of a popular audience. . . . The English ballads that have come down to us fall naturally into three classes: those which reflect the characteristics of the ancient chanson de geste; those which combine the features of the chanson de geste and the literary romance; and those which have a purely literary origin in the romance, lay, or fabliau!' Mr Courthope chooses 'The Battle of Otterburn' as an example of his first class; the Robin Hood ballads of the second; and in the third set he places 'Sir Aldingar,' 'Sir Cauline,' ‘Earl Brand,' 'Child Waters,' and the like. In all these classes are 'plain traces of decline from a more ancient and nobler model.' 'As an almost invariable rule, the ballad, when composed in the first place for the purposes of amusement, reproduces, in a mould peculiar to itself, the subject-matter of the older gests, romances, or lays. The tales on which it is founded are rarely, if ever, the legacy of long oral tradition... Again: 'The ballad was usually a précis of a romance. . . . . . Mr Gregory Smith also 'must consider the ballad as part of the literary débris of the Middle Ages' (The Transition Period, p. 186). In perhaps more numerous cases the popular ballad does not 'reproduce, in a mould peculiar to itself, the subject-matter of the older gests, romances, or lays.' The ballad-maker works on the original data of world-wide popular tradition. Thus Professor Child writes (i. 98): 'The idea of the love-animated plants has been thought to be derived from the romance of Tristan, where it also occurs; agreeably to a general principle, somewhat hastily assumed, that when romances and popular ballads have anything in common, priority belongs to the romances.' This is Mr Courthope's principle; but too often it contains the reverse of the truth. The popular Märchen on which the Odyssey is based are found all over the world, and cannot have been derived by savages and peasants from the Odyssey, which Homer wove, as Fénelon remarks, out of old wives' fables. Thus, while old literature has borrowed from popular fancy, popular fancy now reclaims its own from literature, now works on original data that literature has neglected. There is not, as Mr Courthope holds, anything 'mysterious' in this theory, beyond the unsolved mystery of the remote origin and evolution of popular tales, and their wide diffusion. Given the regular stock of the incidents of Märchen, and given the primitive ideas and customs on which they rest, any member of the people, illiterate but poetical, could turn these data into rhyme. No professed literary man was needed. Once composed and chanted, the ballad became the property of the people, and was altered to taste by reciters, and broken into a crowd of variants. Nothing, of course, prevented a professed minstrel, or the author of the legend of a saint, from making prize either of the original data or of the ballad; and if the minstrel did so, his poem, in turn, might be corrupted and altered by popular reciters. There has, in fact, been a come and go of popular data, of literary handling, and of degradation, especially notable in Cruikshank's 'Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman,' a cockney variant of a ballad really ancient, and of a still older legend (see Child's variants under 'Young Beichan'). The two schools of opinion-the popular, as represented here, and the literary, as represented by Mr Courthope- have both right on their side. The process favoured by Mr Courthope We have already remarked on a few samples of that class of ballads which may be regarded as précis of literary romances or chansons de geste. But the matter even of these is 'the legacy of oral tradition,' as Professor Child shows, contrary to the opinion of Mr Courthope, whose chapter on ballads does not display any special acquaintance-namely, the popularisation of literary romances with the comparative study of the world's ancient, traditional, and popular narratives in verse and prose. The fictitious literature, in prose or verse, of the Middle Ages is, we maintain, like the epics of Homer, really based throughout on popular tales, much older, and much more widely diffused, than written manuscripts. Often the professional and literary poet borrows, like Homer and the authors of the chansons de geste and the romances, from popular tales peculiar to no race of mankind. Occasionally the authors of ballads for the people have taken back their own' (as Molière said) from the hands of the professional literary class. and chansons de geste-did exist. But these literary works were themselves elaborations of popular traditions, and in many cases the popular ballad author seems to have worked on popular materials, unhelped by any literary handling of them. A good example of the process is afforded by the familiar contes or popular tales of Charles Perrault, 'Cinderella,' and the rest. They were gathered by Perrault, under Louis XIV., from oral tradition, and were recast by him into literary shape. But his literary handling has hardly affected the surviving oral and popular forms of the same tales, as current either in France or other countries, European, African, or Asiatic. On the other hand, French popular tales have been adapted to their own habits and manners by Red Indians, just as some balladmakers adapted literary romances to popular taste. One or two examples of ballads apparently quite popular in origin may be given. Thus we have Professor Child's first ballad, 'Riddles Wisely Expounded.' A girl lies with a knight, and then asks him to marry her. He will do so if she can answer certain riddles, and she succeeds. The idea is as old, and as popular, as the story of Samson or of Edipus, and the riddles (devinettes) are of the kind familiar to Basutos and Fijians. They can be made the pivot of any sort of Märchen, and the Märchen may, anywhere, be turned into verse as it is among Celts, Russians, Germans, and Scots. No literary intervention is required. A similar donnée (in 'The Elfin Knight') occurs in the Irish saga of 'Graidhne and Diarmaid,' but not thence did it find its way into the Gesta Romanorum, a literary work which, again, can hardly be the source of the Turkish variant, the Magyar, the Sanskrit, or the Tibetan. The Gesta may, conceivably, be the source of our ballad, but the data of the Gesta were contributed by popular fancy. Lady Isabel,' again, is of wonderfully wide distribution, and exists in mingled prose and verse. As a woman saves her own life by ingeniously slaying her would-be murderer, who has already slain several women, there is an element of the 'Bluebeard' Märchen. But Professor Bugge derives the main idea from the tale of 'Judith and Holofernes' in the Apocrypha. That tale may conceivably have contributed, but is itself probably only a literary adaptation of a Märchen. Holofernes is human; the villain of the ballads is an elf. At most there is the usual come and go of literary and popular handling and data. 'Willie's Lady' turns on a piece of popular magic as old in literature as Theocritus in Idyll ii., or as Ovid (Metam. ix. 281-315). If the idea is found in a romance (and we do not know that it is) the ballad-maker need not have borrowed from the romance a notion still familiar in everyday folklore magic. The donnée of the 'Fairy Queen' and 'Tamlane' does occur in romance, but it is also an article of worldwide popular belief. The retrieval of a lover lost in Fairyland appears in the literary romance of 'Orfeo,' where the lady, not the knight as in 'Tamlane,' is won back. But the notion still persisting in Ireland, as it recently did in Scotland, there is no reason for holding that the romance of 'Orfeo' suggested the ballad of 'Tamlane.' On the other side, the analogous adventure of Thomas the Rhymer, in the ballad of that name, is clearly based, in part, on the literary romance of 'Ogier le Danois,' which itself, again, has a popular foundation. We might illustrate, at any length, this va-et-vient of the literary and popular elements in ballads. In 'Tamlane' some local poet or reciter has added local touches. The scene is Carterhaugh, where Ettrick and Yarrow meet; and in one version the Earls of Moray (Randolph) and of March are parents of the lovers. But such localisations (which are common) are not usually original parts of the story. Nor do they fix a date. | Randolph and the Cospatricks were well-known historical figures, and, at almost any time, might be accommodated to any romantic legend. By a similar early accommodation does William of Malmesbury (ob. 1143) tell a story of Gunhild, daughter of King Cnut, which recurs in the ballad of 'Sir Aldingar.' William's version is adapted in a French metrical life of Edward the Confessor. But we are not to infer that the source of the ballad is necessarily literary, for, as Professor Child remarks, we cannot well doubt that William of Malmesbury is citing a ballad. . . . A ballad is known to have been made on a similar and equally fabulous adventure which is alleged in chronicle to have occurred to Gunhild's mother.' Mr Courthope (vol. i. p. 450) is apparently following Professor Child's historical account of the ballad of 'Sir Aldingar;' but in place of saying with Professor Child that William is 'citing a ballad,' he writes, 'William of Malmesbury perhaps derived his account from a Latin poem on the subject.' He gives no reason for preferring the hypothesis of 'a Latin poem' to Professor Child's theory of a ballad as William's source. Professor Child next gives analogous Märchen about illustrious ladies, running back as far as the middle of the seventh century; and suggests that this very ancient popular tale, intruded into history, 'is the root of the Scandinavian-English story.' Thus 'Sir Aldingar' does not, as Mr Courthope thinks, support his theory of the literary origin of ballads and of the absence of popular data. It does precisely the reverse; it is an example of the process by which a popular fable is attached to a series of historical characters, and is finally adopted by so respectable an historian as William of Malmesbury. Meanwhile the authority of Professor Child confirms our theory that, far from the literary history being the source of our ballad, a ballad is the source of the literary history in William of Malmesbury. The author of our 'Sir Aldingar' may have known and used the French 'Life of St Edward,' but the whole fable is popular and ancient. 'There is little or nothing in all these tales that can be historically authenticated, and much that is in plain contradiction with history. Putting history out of the question, there is no footing firmer than air for him who would essay to trace the order of the development.' Given the institution of trial by battle-a woman being represented by her champion-and given the worldwide delight in the success of weakness over strength (David and Goliath), then the data of 'Sir Aldingar' exist, and the legend is applied to many historical queens long before Gunhild. Whether our 'Sir Aldingar' has borrowed literary elements or not is unimportant. There remain the historical ballads. Of these, such things as 'Kinmont Willie,' 'The Fire o' |