f the ballad literature of
Europe in general. The result of the discussion was to leave a vague
impression that the Scottish ballads were perhaps as old as the time of
Dunbar, and were the production of a class of professional minstrels. These
minstrels are a stumbling-block in the way of the student of the growth of
ballads. The domestic annals of Scotland show that her kings used to keep
court-bards, and also that strollers, _jongleurs_, as they were called,
went about singing at the doors of farm-houses and in the streets of towns.
Here were two sets of minstrels who had apparently left no poetry; and, on
the other side, there was a number of ballads that claimed no author. It
was the easiest and most satisfactory inference that the courtly minstrels
made the verses, which the wandering crowders imitated or corrupted. But
this theory fails to account, among other things, for the universal
sameness of tone, of incident, of legend, of primitive poetical formulae,
which the Scottish ballad possesses, in common with the ballads of Greece,
of France, of Provence, of Portugal, of Denmark and of Italy. The object,
therefore, of this article is to prove that what has long been acknowledged
of nursery tales, of what the Germans call _Maerchen_, namely, that they
are the immemorial inheritance at least of all European peoples, is true
also of some ballads. Their present form, of course, is relatively recent:
in centuries of oral recitation the language altered automatically, but the
stock situations and ideas of many romantic ballads are of dateless age and
world-wide diffusion. The main incidents and plots of the fairy tales of
Celts and Germans and Slavonic and Indian peoples, their unknown antiquity
and mysterious origin, are universally recognized. No one any longer
attributes them to this or that author, or to this or that date. The
attempt to find date or author for a genuine popular song is as futile as a
similar search in the case of a _Maerchen_. It is to be asked, then,
whether what is confessedly true of folk-tales,--of such stories as the
_Sleeping Beauty_ and _Cinderella_,--is true also of folk-songs. Are they,
or have they been, as universally sung as the fairy tales have been
narrated? Do they, too, bear traces of the survival of primitive creeds and
primitive forms of consciousness and of imagination? Are they, like
_Maerchen_, for the most part, little influenced by the higher religions,
Christian or polytheistic