some inconsiderate hand, wielding the pen or shears,
blots out or snips off the poet's name, and henceforth the song is
anonymous. A great iconoclast--a royal old iconoclast--is Time: but he
hath no terrors for those precious things which are embalmed in words,
and the only fellow that shall surely escape him till the crack of doom
is he whom men know by the name of Anonymous!"

"Doubtless you speak truly," said the Judge; "yet it would be
different if I but had the ordering of things. I would let the poets
live forever and I would kill off most of their poetry."

I do not wonder that Ritson and Percy quarrelled. It was his
misfortune that Ritson quarrelled with everybody. Yet Ritson was a
scrupulously honest man; he was so vulgarly sturdy in his honesty that
he would make all folk tell the truth even though the truth were of
such a character as to bring the blush of shame to the devil's hardened
cheek.

On the other hand, Percy believed that there were certain true things
which should not be opened out in the broad light of day; it was this
deep-seated conviction which kept him from publishing the manuscript
folio, a priceless treasure, which Ritson never saw and which, had it
fallen in Ritson's way instead of Percy's, would have been clapped at
once into the hands of the printer.

How fortunate it is for us that we have in our time so great a scholar
as Francis James Child, so enamored of balladry and so learned in it,
to complete and finish the work of his predecessors. I count myself
happy that I have heard from the lips of this enthusiast several of
the rarest and noblest of the old British and old Scottish ballads; and
I recall with pride that he complimented me upon my spirited vocal
rendering of "Burd Isabel and Sir Patrick," "Lang Johnny More," "The
Duke o' Gordon's Daughter," and two or three other famous songs which I
had learned while sojourning among the humbler classes in the North of
England.

After paying our compliments to the Robin Hood garlands, to Scott, to
Kirkpatrick Sharpe, to Ritson, to Buchan, to Motherwell, to Laing, to
Christie, to Jamieson, and to the other famous lovers and compilers of
balladry, we fell to discoursing of French song and of the service that
Francis Mahony performed for English-speaking humanity when he
exploited in his inimitable style those lyrics of the French and the
Italian people which are now ours as much as they are anybody else's.

Dear old Beranger! w