The material of the ballad may be either romantic or historical. The former class is based on one of the primeval invented situations, one of the elements of the _Märchen_ in prose. Such tales or myths occur in the stories of savages, in the legends of peasants, are interwoven later with the plot in Epic or Romance, and may also inspire ballads. Popular superstitions, the witch, metamorphosis, the returning ghost, the fairy, all of them survivals of the earliest thought, naturally play a great part. The Historical ballad, on the other hand, has a basis of resounding fact, murder, battle, or fire-raising, but the facts, being derived from popular rumour, are immediately corrupted and distorted, sometimes out of all knowledge. Good examples are the ballads on Darnley’s murder and the youth of James VI. In the romantic class, we may take _Tamlane_. Here the idea of fairies stealing children is thoroughly popular; they also steal young men as lovers, and again, men may win fairy brides, by clinging to them through all transformations. A classical example is the seizure of Thetis by Peleus, and Child quotes a modern Cretan example. The dipping in milk and water, I may add, has precedent in ancient Egypt (in _The Two Brothers_), and in modern Senegambia. The fairy tax, tithe, or teind, paid to Hell, is illustrated by old trials for witchcraft, in Scotland. {0a} Now, in literary forms and romance, as in _Ogier le Danois_, persons are carried away by the Fairy King or Queen. But here the literary romance borrows from popular superstition; the ballad has no need to borrow a familiar fact from literary romance. On the whole subject the curious may consult “The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies,” by the Reverend Robert Kirk of Aberfoyle, himself, according to tradition, a victim of the fairies. Thus, in _Tamlane_, the whole _donnée_ is popular. But the current version, that of Scott, is contaminated, as Scott knew, by incongruous modernisms. Burns’s version, from tradition, already localizes the events at Carterhaugh, the junction of Ettrick and Yarrow. But Burns’s version does not make the Earl of Murray father of the hero, nor the Earl of March father of the heroine. Roxburgh is the hero’s father in Burns’s variant, which is more plausible, and the modern verses do not occur. This ballad apparently owes nothing to literary romance. In _Mary Hamilton_ we have a notable instance of the Historical Ballad. No Marie of Mary Stuart’s suffered death for child murder.