This pleasure in rhythm is persistent, and it is strongly marked even in untrained minds. In natures unspoiled and healthy, natures not bewildered and sophisticated by a false idea of cultivation, or deceived into unsound notions of the real value of poetry, the taste remains sound and good. In the youth of a race this natural enjoyment of verse is gratified by folk-songs. These early forms are naturally undeveloped and simple, but the lays are genuine and wholesome; they possess lasting quality. Different peoples have in differing degrees the power of appreciating verse, but I do not know that any race has been found to lack it entirely. There is abundant evidence that the Anglo-Saxon and Norman ancestors from whom sprang the English-speaking peoples were in this respect richly endowed, and that they early went far in the development of this power. The old ballads of our language are so rich and so enduringly beautiful that we are proved to come from a stock endowed with a rich susceptibility to poetry. If this taste has not been generally developed it is from some reason other than racial incapacity. Nothing need be looked for in early literatures sweeter and sounder than the fine old ballads of "Chevy Chace," "Tamlane," "Sir Patrick Spens," or "Clerk Saunders." Many a later poet of no mean reputation has failed to strike so deep and true a note as rings through these songs made by forgotten minstrels for a ballad-loving people. There are not too many English-speaking poets to-day who could match the cry of the wraith of Clerk Saunders at the window of his love:-- Oh, cocks are crowing a merry midnight, The wild fowls are boding day; Give me my faith and troth again, Let me fare on my way.... Cauld mould it is my covering now, But and my winding sheet; The dew it falls nae sooner down Than my resting-place is weet! How far popular taste has departed from an appreciation of verse that is simple and genuine is shown by those favorite rhymes which are unwearyingly yearned for in the columns of Notes and Queries, and which reappear with periodic persistence in Answers to Correspondents. In educated persons, it is true, there is still a love of what is really good in verse, but it is far too rare. The general ear and the general taste have become vitiated. There is a melancholy and an amazing number of readers who are pleased only with rhymes of the sort of Will Carleton's "Farm Ballads," the sentimentally inane jingles published in the feminine domestic periodicals, and the rest of what might be called, were not the phrase perilously near to the vulgar, the chewing-gum school of verse.