il, though her coffin had been sprinkled with holy water and bound
with a triple chain. For material Southey drew upon Spanish chronicles,
French _fabliaux_, the "Acta Sanctorum," Matthew of Westminster, and many
other sources. His ballads do not compare well with those of Scott and
Coleridge. They abound in the supernatural--miracles of saints,
sorceries, and apparitions; but the matter-of-fact narrative,
common-place diction, and jog-trot verse are singularly out of keeping
with the subject matter. The most wildly romantic situations become
tamely unromantic under Southey's handling. Though in better taste than
Lewis' grisly compositions, yet, as in Lewis, the want of "high
seriousness" or any finer imagination in these legendary tales makes them
turn constantly towards the comic; so that Southey was scandalised to
learn that Mr. Payne Collier had taken his "Old Woman of Berkeley" for a
"mock ballad" or parody. He affected especially a stanza which he
credited to Lewis' invention:

"Behind a wide column, half breathless with fear
She crept to conceal herself there;
That instant the moon o'er a dark cloud shone clear,
And she saw in the moonlight two ruffians appear,
And between them a corpse did they bear." [5]

Southey employs no archaisms, no refrains, nor any of the stylistic marks
of ancient minstrelsy. His ballads have the metrical roughness and plain
speech of the old popular ballads, but none of their frequent, peculiar
beauties of thought and phrase,

Spain, no less than Germany and Italy, was laid under contribution by the
English romantics. Southey's work in this direction was followed by such
things as Lockhart's "Spanish Ballads" (1824), Irving's "Alhambra," and
Bryant's and Longfellow's translations from Spanish lyrical poetry. But
these exotics did not stimulate original creative activity in England in
equal degree with the German and Italian transplantings. They were
imported, not appropriated. Of all European countries Spain had remained
the most Catholic and mediaeval. Her eight centuries of struggle against
the Moors had given her a rich treasure of legendary song and story. She
had a body of popular ballad poetry larger than either England's or
Germany's.[6] But Spain had no modern literature to mediate between the
old and new; nothing at all corresponding with the schools of romance in
Germany, from Herder to Schlegel, which effected a revival of the
Teutonic Middle A