origin of ballads. Instead of regarding them as a slow, shadowed,
natural growth, finally fossilized in print, from the rhythmic cries
of a barbaric dance-circle in its festal hour, there is a weighty
school of critics who hold them to be the mere rag-tag camp-followers
of mediaeval romance. See, for instance, the clownish ballad of _Tom
Thumbe,_ with its confused Arthurian echoes. Some of the events
recorded in our ballads, moreover, are placed by definite local
tradition at a comparatively recent date, as _Otterburne, Edom o'
Gordon, Kinmont Willie._ What becomes, then, of their claims to long
descent? If these do not fall, it is because they are based less on
the general theme and course of the story, matters that seem to
necessitate an individual composer, than on the so-called communal
elements of refrain, iteration, stock stanzas, stock epithets, stock
numbers, stock situations, the frank objectivity of the point of view,
the sudden glimpses into a pagan world.

In the lands of the schoolhouse, the newspaper, and the public
library, the conditions of ballad-production are past and gone. Yet
there are still a few isolated communities in Europe where genuine
folk-songs of spontaneous composition may be heard by the eavesdropper
and jotted down with a surreptitious pencil; for the rustics shrink
from the curiosity of the learned and are silent in the presence of
strangers. The most precious contribution to our literature from such
a, source is _The Bard of the Dimbovitza_, an English translation of
folk-songs and ballads peculiar to a certain district of Roumania.
They were gathered by a native gentlewoman from among the peasants on
her father's estate. "She was forced," writes Carmen Sylva, Queen of
Roumania, one of the two translators, "to affect a desire to learn
spinning, that she might join the girls at their spinning parties, and
so overhear their songs more easily; she hid in the tall maize to hear