me. There was, at a lesser number, enough of a challenge about
it for squires of England, never in those days backward to pick up a
glove or give the ringing rejoinder for a thumb-bite, to ride out and
tilt compliments with the Whitechapel Countess's green cavaliers, rally
their sprites and entertain them exactly according to their degrees of
dignity, as exhibited by their 'haviour under something of a trial; and
satisfy also such temporary appetites as might be excited in them by
(among other matters left to the luck of events) a metropolitan play
upon the Saxon tongue, hard of understanding to the leeky cocks until
their ready store of native pepper seasons it; which may require a
corresponding English condiment to rectify the flavour of the stew.

Now the number of Saxe-Normans riding out to meet and greet the Welshmen
is declared to have not exceeded nine. So much pretends to be historic,
in opposition to the poetic version. They would, we may be sure, have
made it a point of honour to meet and greet their invading guests in
precisely similar numbers a larger would have overshot the mark of
courtesy; and doubtless a smaller have fallen deplorably short of it.
Therefore, an acquaintance with her chivalrous, if less impulsive,
countrymen compels to the dismissing of the Dame's ballad authorities.
She has every right to quote them for her own good pleasure, and may
create in others an enjoyment of what has been called 'the Mackrell
fry.'

Her notion of a ballad is, that it grows like mushrooms from a scuffle
of feet on grass overnight, and is a sort of forest mother of the pied
infant reared and trimmed by historians to show the world its fatherly
antecedent steps. The hand of Rose Mackrell is at least suggested in
more than one of the ballads. Here the Welsh irruption is a Chevy Chase;
next we have the countess for a disputed Helen.

The lady's lord is not a shining figure. How can an undecided one be a
dispenser of light? Poetry could never allow him to say with her:

'Where'er I go I make a name,
And leave a song to follow.'

Yet he was the master of her fortunes at the time; all the material
power was his. Even doggerel verse (it is worth while to brood on the
fact) denies a surviving pre-eminence to the potent moody, reverses the
position between the driven and the driver. Poetry, however erratic, is
less a servant of the bully Present, or pomlious Past, than History. The
Muse of History h