Homer himself was nothing more than a blind ballad-singer, whose songs
had been subsequently joined together and formed into an epic poem.
Ramsay's ballads were taken in part from a manuscript collection of some
eight hundred pages, made by George Bannatyne about 1570 and still
preserved in the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh.

In Nos. 70, 74, and 85, of the _Spectator_, Addison had praised the
naturalness and simplicity of the popular ballads, selecting for special
mention "Chevy Chase"--the later version--"which," he wrote, "is the
favorite ballad of the common people of England; and Ben Jonson used to
say he had rather have been the author of it than of all his works"; and
"the 'Two Children in the Wood,' which is one of the darling songs of the
common people, and has been the delight of most Englishmen in some part
of their age." Addison justifies his liking for these humble poems by
classical precedents. "The greatest modern critics have laid it down as
a rule that an heroic poem should be founded upon some important precept
of morality adapted to the constitution of the country in which the poet
writes. Homer and Virgil have formed their plans in this view."
Accordingly he thinks that the author of "Chevy Chase" meant to point a
moral as to the mischiefs of private war. As if it were not precisely
the _gaudium certaminis_ that inspired the old border ballad-maker! As
if he did not glory in the fight! The passage where Earl Percy took the
dead Douglas by the hand and lamented his fallen foe reminds Addison of
Aeneas' behavior toward Lausus. The robin red-breast covering the
children with leaves recalls to his mind a similar touch in one of
Horace's odes. But it was much that Addison, whose own verse was so
artificial, should have had a taste for the wild graces of folk-song. He
was severely ridiculed by his contemporaries for these concessions. "He
descended now and then to lower disquisitions," wrote Dr. Johnson," and
by a serious display of the beauties of 'Chevy Chase,' exposed himself to