he tragedy, the Pindaric ode. It is simple and not complex like
the sonnet: not of the aristocracy of verse, but popular--not to say
plebeian--in its associations. It is easy to write and, in its commonest
metrical shape of eights and sixes, apt to run into sing-song. Its
limitations, even in the hands of an artist like Coleridge or Rossetti,
are obvious. It belongs to "minor poetry." The ballad revival has not
been an unmixed blessing and is responsible for much slip-shod work. If
Dr. Johnson could come back from the shades and look over our recent
verse, one of his first comments would probably be: "Sir, you have too
many ballads." Be it understood that the romantic ballad only is here in
question, in which the poet of a literary age seeks to catch and
reproduce the tone of a childlike, unself-conscious time, so that his art
has almost inevitably something artificial or imitative. Here and there
one stands out from the mass by its skill or luck in overcoming the
difficulty. There is Hawker's "Song of the Western Men," which Macaulay
and others quoted as historical, though only the refrain was old:

"And shall Trelawney die?
Here's twenty thousand Cornish men
Will know the reason why!" [20]

There is Sydney Dobell's "Keith of Ravelston," [21] which haunts the
memory with the insistent iteration of its refrain:--

"The murmur of the mourning ghost
That keeps the shadowy kine;
Oh, Keith of Ravelston,
The sorrows of thy line!"

And again there is Robert Buchanan's "Ballad of Judas Iscariot" which Mr.
Stedman compares for "weird impressiveness and power" with "The Ancient
Mariner." The mediaeval feeling is most successfully captured in this
poem. It recalls the old "Debate between the Body and Soul," and still
more the touches of divine compassion which soften the rigours of
Catholic theology in the legends of the saints. It strikes the keynote,
too, of that most modern ballad mode which employs the narrative only to
emphasize some thought of universal application. There is salvation for
all, is the thought, even for the blackest soul of the world, the soul
that betrayed its Maker.[22] Such, though after a fashion more subtly
intellectual, is the doctrinal use to which this popular form is put by
one of the latest English ballad makers, Mr. John Davidson. Read, e.g.,
his "Ballad of a Nun," [23] the story of which was told in several shapes
by the Spanish poet Alfonso the Learned (1226-