nsed,
and expressive style; that they may teach you what elevation of
language, what class of sounds, what flow of words may best suit your
tone of thought and feeling, that they may prevent in you that
tendency to monotonous repetition, and vain wordiness, which is the
bosom sin of most uneducated prose writers, not only of the ladies of
the nineteenth century, but of the Middle Age monks, who, having in
general no poetry on which to form their taste, except the effeminate
and bombastic productions of the dying Roman empire, fell into a
certain washy prolixity, which has made monk Latin a byword, and puts
one sadly in mind of what is too truly called "young ladies'
English."

I should like then to begin with two or three of the early ballads,
and carefully analyse them with you. I am convinced that in them we
may discover many of the great primary laws of composition, as well
as the secrets of sublimity and pathos in their very simplest
manifestations. It may be that there are some here to whom the study
of old ballads may be a little distasteful, who are in an age when
the only poetry which has charms is the subjective and self-conscious
"poetry of the heart"--to whom a stanza of "Childe Harolde" may seem
worth all the ballads that ever were written: but let me remind them
that woman is by her sex an educator, that every one here must
expect, ay hope, to be employed at some time or other in training the
minds of children; then let me ask them to recall the years in which
objective poems, those which dealt with events, ballads, fairy tales,
down to nursery rhymes, were their favourite intellectual food, and
let me ask them whether it will not be worth while, for the sake of
the children whom they may hereafter influence, to bestow a little
thought on this earlier form of verse.

I must add too, that without some understanding of these same
ballads, we shall never arrive at a critical appreciation of
Shakespeare. For the English drama springs from an intermarriage
between this same ballad poetry, the poetry of incidents, and that
subjective elegiac poetry which deals with the feelings and
consciousnesses of man. They are the two poles, by whose union our
drama is formed, and some critical knowledge of both of them will be,
as I said, necessary before we can study it.

After the ballads, we ought, I think, to know a little about the
early Norman poetry, whose fusion with the pure north Saxon ballad
school produ