If the people," says M. Pitre, "find out
who is the composer of a _canzone_, they will not sing it." Now in those
lands where a blithe peasant life still exists with its dances, like the
_kolos_ of Russia, we find ballads identical in many respects with those
which have died out of oral tradition in these islands. It is natural to
conclude that originally some of the British ballads too were first
improvised, and circulated in rustic dances. We learn from M. Bujeaud and
M. de Puymaigre in France, that all ballads there have their air or tune,
and that every dance has its own words, for if a new dance comes in,
perhaps a fashionable one from Paris, words are fitted to it. Is there any
trace of such an operatic, lyrical, dancing peasantry in austere Scotland?
We find it in Gawin Douglas's account of--

"Sic as we clepe wenches and damosels,
In gersy greens, wandering by spring wells,
Of bloomed branches, and flowers white and red,
Plettand their lusty chaplets for their head,
Some sang ring-sangs, dances, ledes, and rounds."

Now, ring-sangs are ballads, dancing songs; and _Young Tamlane_, for
instance, was doubtless once danced to, as we know it possessed an
appropriate air. Again, Fabyan, the chronicler (quoted by Ritson) says that
the song of triumph over Edward II., "was after many days sung _in dances_,
to the carols of the [v.03 p.0267] maidens and minstrels of Scotland." We
might quote the _Complaynt of Scotland_ to the same effect. "The shepherds,
and their wyvis sang mony other melodi sangs, ... than efter this sueit
celestial harmony, tha began to dance in ane ring." It is natural to
conjecture that, if we find identical ballads in Scotland, and in Greece
and Italy, and traces of identical customs--customs crushed by the
Reformation, by Puritanism, by modern so-called civilization,--the ballads
sprang out of the institution of dances, as they still do in warmer and
pleasanter climates. It may be supposed that legends on which the ballads
are composed, being found as they are from the White Sea to Cape Matapan,
are part of the stock of primitive folk-lore. Thus we have an immemorial
antiquity for the legends, and for the lyrical choruses in which their
musical rendering was improvised. We are still at a loss to discover the
possibly mythological germs of the legends; but, at all events, some
ballads may be claimed as distinctly popular, and, so to speak, impersonal
in matter and in origin. It would be e