yield place to the Lord Chamberlain's players. In the dramas of
Shakespeare the popular note is still audible, but only as an undertone,
furnishing comic relief to the romantic amours of courtly lovers or the
tragic fall of Princes; with Beaumont and Fletcher, and still more with
Dryden and the Restoration dramatists, the popular element in the drama
passes away, and the triumph of the court is complete. The Elizabethan
court could find no use for the popular ballad, but, like other forms of
literature, it was attracted from the country-side to the city. Forgetful
of the greenwood, it now battened on the garbage of Newgate, and 'Robin
Hood and Guy of Gisburn' yields place to 'The Wofull Lamentation
of William Purchas, who for murthering his Mother at Thaxted, was
executed at Chelmsford'.

We are justly proud of the Renaissance and of the glories of our
Elizabethan literature, but let us frankly own that in the annals of
poetry there was loss as well as gain. The gain was for the courtier and
the scholar, and for all those who, in the centuries that followed the
Renaissance, have been able, by means of education, to enter into the
courtier's and scholar's inheritance. The loss has been for the people.
The opposition between courtly taste and popular taste is hard to analyse,
but we have only to turn our eyes from England to Scotland, which lost its
royal court in 1603, in order to appreciate the reality of the
opposition. In Scotland the courtly poetry of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries soon disappeared when James I exchanged Holyrood for Whitehall,
but popular poetry continued to live and grow. The folk-song gathered
power and sweetness all through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
till it culminated at last in the lyric of Burns. Popular drama, never
firmly rooted in Scotland, was stamped out by the Reformation, but the
popular ballad outlived the mediaeval minstrel, was kept alive in the
homes of Lowland farmers and shepherds, and called into being the great