best-known Scottish version has become _Glenkindie_, has been
translated as _Glas-keraint_--Geraint, the Blue Bard--an Orpheus among
the Brythons, whose chief legendary sites, according to Mr. Skene,
Professor Rhys, and other authorities, are to be sought in Scotland and
its borderlands. The fame of this harper, who, like Glenkindie, could
'wile the fish from the flood,' came down to the times of Chaucer and
Gavin Douglas, and was by them passed on; the former mentions him in his
_House of Fame_ along with Chiron and Orion,

'And other Harpers many one,
With the Briton, Glasgerion.'

It is not too much to conjecture that it was remembered also in popular
poetry; and these and other classical writers of the Middle Ages, who
despised not the common folk and their ways, no doubt drank deeply of
knowledge and inspiration from the clear and hidden well of English
poetry and romance even then existing in ballad lore. In fact, it seems
as probable that the prose and metrical romances of chivalry have been
derived from the folk-songs they resemble, as that the ballads have been
borrowed from the romances; perhaps both owe their descent to a common
and forgotten ancestor.

Is it too much to believe that in our older ballads we hear the echoes
of the voices--it may be the very words--of the old bards, the harpers
and the minstrels, who sang in the ears of princes and people as far
back as history can carry us? We know, by experience of other lands and
races, from Samoa to Sicily, that are still in their earlier or later
ballad-age, that the making of ballads is almost as old as the making of
war or of love--that it long precedes letters, to say nothing of the
printed page. It comes as natural for men to sing of the pangs of
passion, or of the joys of victory, as to kiss or to fight. For untold
generations the harps twanged in the hall, and the song of battle and
the song of sorrow found eager listeners. All the while, the same tales,
though perhaps in ruder and simpler guise, met with as warm a welcome in
road and field and at country merrymaking. Trouvere and wandering
minstrel, gleeman and eke gleemaiden, passed from place to place and
from land to land repeating, altering, adapting the old stock of heroic
or lovelorn ditties, or inventing new ones. They were a law unto
themselves in other matters than metres; and had their own guilds, their
own courts, and their own kings. The names of all but a few that
chance, mor