into the exquisite lyrical measures of Italy; while the mysteries and miracle-plays, also of Continental impulse, were striving to do God service by impressing the Scripture stories upon their rustic audiences,--the ballads were being sung and told from Scottish loch to English lowland, in hamlet and in hall. Heartily enjoyed in the baronial castle, scandalously well known in the monastery, they were dearest to the peasants. "Lewd peple loven tales olde; Swiche thinges can they wel report and holde." The versions in which we possess such ballads to-day are comparatively modern. Few can be dated further back than the reign of Elizabeth; the language of some is that of the eighteenth century. But the number and variety of these versions--the ballad of _Lord Ronald,_ for instance, being given in fifteen forms by Professor Child in his monumental edition of _The English and Scottish Popular Ballads;_ where "Lord Ronald, my son," appears variously as "Lord Randal, my son," "Lord Donald, my son," "King Henrie, my son," "Lairde Rowlande, my son," "Billy, my son," "Tiranti, my son," "my own pretty boy," "my bonnie wee croodlin dow," "my little wee croudlin doo," "Willie doo, Willie doo," "my wee wee croodlin doo doo"--are sure evidence of oral transmission, and oral transmission is in itself evidence of antiquity. Many of our ballads, moreover,--nearly a third of the present collection, as the notes will show,--are akin to ancient ballads of Continental Europe, or of Asia, or both, which set forth the outlines of the same stories in something the same way. It should be stated that there is another theory altogether as to the 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.