To agree with Mr. Child, we must not only accept one great ballad-
poet, born at least fifty years too late; we must not only admit
that such a poet would throw back his facts for a century and a
half; but we must also conceive that the balladising humour, with
its ancient methods, was even more vivacious in Scotland for many
years after 1719 than, as far as we know, it had ever been before.
Yet there is no other trace known to us of the existence of the old
balladising humour and of the old art in all that period. We have
no such ballad about the English captain shot by the writer's pretty
wife, none about the bewitched son of Lord Torphichen, none about
the Old Chevalier, or Lochiel, or Prince Charlie: we have merely
Shenstone's 'Jemmy Dawson' and the Glasgow bellman's rhymed history
of Prince Charles. In fact, 'Jemmy Dawson' is a fair instantia
contradictoria as far as a ballad by a man of letters is to the
point. Such a ballad that age could indeed produce: it is not very
like 'The Queen's Marie'! No, we cannot take refuge in 'Townley's
Ghost' and his address to the Butcher Cumberland:--

Imbrued in bliss, imbathed in case,
Though now thou seem'st to lie,
My injured form shall gall thy peace,
And make thee wish to die!

THAT is a ballad of the eighteenth century, and it is not in the
manner of 'The Queen's Marie.'

These considerations, now so obvious to a student of the art of old
popular poetry, if he thinks of the matter, could not occur to
Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe. He was a great collector of ballads,
but not versed in, or interested in, their 'aesthetic'--in the