expect to discover--time and taste producing frequent changes.
Well, of 'Otterburn' Mr. Child has five versions; of the 'Hunting of
the Cheviot' he has two, with minor modifications indicated by
letters from the 'lower case.' Of 'Gude Wallace' he has eight. Of
'Johnnie Armstrong' he has three. Of 'Kinmont Willie' he has one.
Of 'The Bonnie Earl o' Moray' he has two. Of 'Johnnie Cock' he has
thirteen. Of 'Sir Patrick Spens' he has eighteen. And of 'The
Queen's Marie' (counting Burns's solitary verse and other brief
fragments) Mr. Child has eighteen versions or variants

Thus a ballad made, ex hypothesi Sharpiana, in or after 1719, has
been as much altered in oral tradition as the most popular and
perhaps the oldest historical ballad of all, 'Sir Patrick Spens,'
and much more than any other of the confessedly ancient semi-
historical popular poems. The historical event which may have
suggested 'Sir Patrick Spens' is 'plausibly,' says Mr. Child, fixed
in 1281: it is the marriage of Margaret of Scotland to Eric, King
of Norway. Others suggest so late a date as the wooing of Anne of
Denmark by James VI. Nothing is known. No wonder, then, that in
time an orally preserved ballad grows rich in variants. But that a
ballad of 1719 should, in eighty modern non-balladising years,
become as rich in extant variants, and far more discrepant in their
details, as 'Sir Patrick Spens' is a circumstance for which we
invite explanation.

Will men say, 'The later the ballad, the more it is altered in oral
tradition'? If so, let them, by all means, produce examples! We
should, on this theory, have about a dozen 'Battles of Philiphaugh,'
and at least fifteen 'Bothwell Brigs,' a poem, by the way, much in
the old manner, prosaically applied, and so recent that, in art at