Were Mr. Chambers’s conclusion to be verified, it would be a sore wrench to the patriotic prejudices of many to have to abandon the long-cherished fancy of the immemorial, or at least remote, antiquity of so many fine Scottish favourites. But what a compensation! For then that Lady Wardlaw whom we can already station, for her _Hardyknute_ alone, as undoubtedly one woman of genius in the poverty-stricken Scotland of the beginning of the eighteenth century, would shine out with greatly increased radiance as the author of a whole cycle of the finest ballad-pieces in our language, a figure of very high importance in Scottish literary history, a precursor or sister of Burns and of Scott. For my own part, I would willingly submit to the wrench for a compensation so splendid. I am bound to report, however, that Mr. Chambers’s speculation of 1859 was controverted strenuously at the time, has been pronounced a heresy, and does not seem to have been anywhere generally accepted. It was controverted especially, within a year from its appearance, in a pamphlet of reply by Mr. Norval Clyne of Aberdeen, entitled “The Scottish Romantic Ballads and the Lady Wardlaw Heresy”; and I observe that Professor Child of America, in his great Collection of English and Scottish Ballads, pays no respect to it, treats it as exploded by Mr. Clyne’s reply, and expressly dissociates _Sir Patrick Spens_ and other ballads of the class from _Hardyknute_. It may be enough, in these circumstances, merely to intimate my opinion that the controversy is by no means closed. There were shrewder and deeper suggestions, I think, in Mr. Chambers’s paper of 1859 than Mr. Clyne was able to obviate; and, having observed that most of the lore on the subject used by Mr. Clyne in his reply, his adverse references and quotations included, was derived from Mr. Chambers’s own Introduction and Notes to his three-volume edition of Scottish Songs and Ballads in 1829, I cannot but presume that Mr. Chambers had all that lore sufficiently in his mind thirty years afterwards, and found nothing in it to impede or disconcert him then in his new speculation. Apart, however, from the special question of Lady Wardlaw’s concern in the matter, Mr. Chambers seems to me to have moved a very proper and necessary inquiry when he started his theory of the comparatively recent origin of all or most of the Scottish Romantic Ballads. In what conception, what kind of language, does the opposite theory couch itself? In the conception that, besides the series of those literary products of past Scottish generations, the work of learned or professional writers, from the time of Barbour onwards, that have come down to us in books, or in old manuscript collections like that of Bannatyne, there was always a distinct literature of more lowly origin, consisting of ballads and songs recited or sung in Scottish households in various districts, and orally transmitted from age to age with no