ir heroine's person at
the gates of Esslemont; ich dien their trumpeted motto.

Counting the number at four and twenty, it wears the look of an invasion.
But the said number is a ballad number, and has been since the antique
time. 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)