sound of trumpet. Addison devoted two
articles in the _Spectator_ to a critique of the same poem. Montaigne
praised the _naivete_ of the village carols; and Malherbe preferred a
rustic _chansonnette_ to all the poems of Ronsard. These, however, are rare
instances of the taste for popular poetry, and though the Danish ballads
were collected and printed in the middle of the 16th century, and some
Scottish collections date from the beginning of the 18th, it was not till
the publication of Allan Ramsay's _Evergreen and Tea Table Miscellany_, and
of Bishop Percy's _Reliques_ (1765), that a serious effort was made to
recover Scottish and English folk-songs from the recitation of the old
people who still knew them by heart. At the time when Percy was editing the
_Reliques_, Madame de Chenier, the mother of the celebrated French poet of
that name, composed an essay on the ballads of her native land, modern
Greece; and later, Herder and Grimm and Goethe, in Germany, did for the
songs of their country what Scott did for those of Liddesdale and the
Forest. It was fortunate, perhaps, for poetry, though unlucky for the
scientific study of the ballads, that they were mainly regarded from the
literary point of view. The influence of their artless melody and
straightforward diction may be felt in the lyrics of Goethe and of
Coleridge, of Wordsworth, of Heine and of Andre Chenier. Chenier, in the
most affected age even of French poetry, translated some of the Romaic
ballads; one, as it chanced, being almost identical with that which
Shakespeare borrowed from some English reciter, and put into the mouth of
the mad Ophelia. The beauty of the ballads and the interest they excited
led to numerous forgeries and modern interpolations, which it is seldom
difficult to detect with certainty. Editors could not resist the temptation
to interpolate, to restore, and to improve the fragments that came in their
way. The marquis de la Villemarque, who first drew attention to the ballads
of Brittany, is not wholly free from this fault. Thus a very general
scepticism was awakened, and when questions came to be asked as to the date
and authorship of the Scottish traditional ballads, it is scarcely to be
wondered at that Dr Chambers attributed most of them to the accomplished
Lady Wardlaw, who lived in the middle of the 18th century.

The vexed and dull controversy as to the origin of Scottish folk-songs was
due to ignorance of the comparative method, and o