least, it was produced after the death of the Duke of Monmouth,
slain, it avers, by the machinations of Claverhouse! Of course we
are not asking for exact proportions, since many variants of ballads
may be lost, but merely for proof that, the later a ballad is, the
more variants of it occur. But this contention is probably
impossible, and the numerous variations in 'The Queen's Marie' are
really a proof of long existence in oral tradition, and contradict
the theory espoused by Mr. Child, who later saw the difficulty
involved in his hypothesis.

This argument, though statistical, is, we think, conclusive, and the
other considerations which we have produced in favour of the
antiquity of 'The Queen's Marie' add their cumulative weight.

We have been, in brief, invited to suppose that, about 1719, a Scot
wrote a ballad on an event in contemporary Russian Court life; that
(contrary to use and wont) he threw the story back a century and a
half; that he was a master of an old style, in the practice of his
age utterly obsolete and not successfully imitated; that his poem
became universally popular, and underwent, in eighty years, even
more vicissitudes than most other ballads encounter in three or five
centuries. Meanwhile it is certain that there had been real ancient
ballads, contemporary with the Marian events--ballads on the very
Maries two or three of whom appear in the so-called poem of 1719;
while exactly the same sort of scandal as the ballad records had
actually occurred at Queen Mary's Court in a lower social rank. The
theory of Mr. Child is opposed to our whole knowledge of ballad
literature, of its age, decadence (about 1620-1700), and decease (in
the old kind) as a popular art.