many
artless graces, which, in the opinion of no mean critics, have been
thought to compensate for the want of higher beauties." Indeed how
should it have been otherwise? The old ballads were everything which the
eighteenth century was not. They were rough and wild, where that was
smooth and tame; they dealt, with fierce sincerity, in the elementary
passions of human nature. They did not moralize, or philosophize, or
sentimentalize; were never subtle, intellectual, or abstract. They were
plain English, without finery or elegance. They had certain popular
mannerisms, but none of the conventional figures of speech or rhetorical
artifices like personifications, periphrasis, antithesis, and climax so
dear to the Augustan heart. They were intent on the story--not on the
style--and they just told it and let it go for what it was worth.

Moreover, there are ballads and ballads. The best of them are noble in
expression as well as feeling, unequaled by anything in our medieval
poetry outside of Chaucer; unequaled by Chaucer himself in point of
intensity, in occasional phrases of a piercing beauty:

"The swans-fethers that his arrowe bar
With his hart-blood they were wet."[42]

"O cocks are crowing a merry mid-larf,
A wat the wild fule boded day;
The salms of Heaven will be sung,
And ere now I'll be missed away."[43]

"If my love were an earthly knight,
As he's an elfin gray,
A wad na gie my sin true love
For no lord that ye hae."[44]

"She hang ae napkin at the door,
Another in the ha,
And a' to wipe the trickling tears,
Sae fast as they did fa."[45]

"And all is with one chyld of yours,
I feel stir at my side:
My gowne of green, it is too strait:
Before it was too wide."[46]

Verse of this quality needs no apology. But of many of the ballads,
Dennis' taunt, repeated by Dr. Johnson, is true; they are not merely
rude, but weak and creeping in style. Percy knew that the best of them
would savor better to the palates of his contemporaries if he dressed
them with modern sauces. Yet he must have loved them, himself, in their
native simplicity, and it seems almost incredible that he could have
spoken as he did about Prior's insipid paraphrase of the "Nut Brown
Maid." "If it had no other merit," he says of that most lovely ballad,
"than the having afforded the ground-work to Prior's 'Henry and Emma,'
this ought to preserve