"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 it from oblivion." Prior was a charming writer of