picturesque, sublime, and profoundly reflective, but had parted with the special qualities of energetic simplicity and the vivid impression of fact. Nevertheless, heroic poetry in this sense has never been quite extinguished in Great Britain; it survived, naturally, wherever it could be preserved by a living popular tradition. And so it found a congenial refuge, though in greatly reduced circumstances, in the rough outlying regions where personal strength and daring were still vitally necessary--in the borderland between England and Scotland. An epic poem gave heroic poetry on a grand scale, it told the incidents of a great war: the ballad tells of a single skirmish or foray. Yet the difference is but one of degree, for both epic and ballad were composed for men and by men, who were in the right atmosphere; and so we have here very different work from that of the fanciful romancer. There are not many good examples; yet the antique tone rings out now and then, as in the ballad of Chevy Chase, which commemorates a fierce Northumbrian fight at Otterburne that must have stirred the hearts of the whole countryside. Here you have no knightly tournament, or duel for rescue of dames, but the sharp clash of bloody conflict between English and Scots borderers, the best fighting men of our island. Of course the genuine account, given in Froissart, is very different; but the ballad-singer knows his art; and whereas from history we only learn that a Scottish knight, Sir Hugh Montgomery, was slain in the medley, in the ballad an English archer draws his bow 'An arrow of a cloth yard long To the hard head hayled he.' And then 'Against Sir Hugh Montgomery So right his shaft he set, The swan's feather that his arrow bare In his heart's blood was wet.' In the compressed energy of these four lines, without an epithet or a superfluous word, we have a picture, drawn by a sure hand, of a man drawing his long bow, and driving it from steel to feathers through a knight in armour.