iterary romance (as in
the Arthurian ballads), while the author of the romance again usually
borrowed, like Homer in the _Odyssey_, from popular _Maerchen_ of dateless
antiquity. It would be an error to suppose that most romantic folk-songs
are vulgarizations of literary romance--a view to which Mr Courthope, in
his _History of English Poetry_, and Mr Henderson in _The Border
Minstrelsy_ (1902), incline--and the opposite error would be to hold that
this process of borrowing from and vulgarization of literary medieval
romance never occurred. A good illustration of the true state of the case
will be found in Child's introduction to the ballad of _Young Beichan_.

Gaston Paris, a great authority, holds that early popular poetry is
"improvised and contemporary with its facts" (_Histoire poetique de
Charlemagne_). If this dictum be applied to such ballads as "The Bonny Earl
o' Murray," "Kinmont Willie," "Jamie Telfer" and "Jock o' the Side," it
must appear that the contemporary poets often knew little of the events and
knew that little wrong. We gather the true facts from contemporary letters
and despatches. In the ballads the facts are confused and distorted to such
a degree that we must suppose them to have been composed in a later
generation on the basis of erroneous oral tradition; or, as in the case of
_The Queen's Marie_, to have been later defaced by the fantastic
interpolations of reciters. To prove this it is only necessary to compare
the historical Border ballads (especially those of 1595-1600) with Bain's
_Border Papers_ (1894-1896). Even down to 1750, the ballads on Rob Roy's
sons are more or less mythopoeic. It seems probable that the existing form
of most of our border ballads is not earlier than the generation of
1603-1633, after the union of the crowns. Even when the ballads have been
taken from recitation, the reciter has sometimes been inspired by a "stall
copy," or printed broadsheet.

AUTHORITIES.--The indispensable book for the student of ballads is Child's
_English and Scottish Popular Ballads_, published in 1897-1898 (Boston,
U.S.A.). Professor Child unfortunately died without summing up his ideas in
a separate essay, and they must be sought in his introductions, which have
never been analysed. He did not give much attention to such materials for
the study of ancient poetry as exist copiously in anthropological
treatises. In knowledge of the ballads of all European peoples he was
unrivalled, and his bi