music, are almost as peculiar and inimitable as those of Scotland or Russia. Those of ancient origin--roughly speaking, from Elizabeth’s time or previous--are modal in style. But the modes are not the usual ones of the melodic minor or its most familiar variation, the Doric. They are the queerest things imaginable to modern ears, strange scales with raised sixths and lowered sevenths, melting from minor into major and back again. The feeling for the tonic is often very vague, the chief note of the scale being sometimes the second or the fourth or the fifth. These unquestionable evidences of antiquity lend a strange charm to the melodies. And the charm is one that is distinct from that of every other national folk-music. The earliest of the English songs, barring a few questionable specimens, probably date from the time of Henry VIII (1491-1547), who was himself an accomplished musician and composer of several excellent songs. Among these are the Boar’s Head Carol, antedating 1521, still sung at Christmas gatherings; and the traditional tune for Shakespeare’s lyric, ‘Oh, Mistress Mine.’ Some of the simple airs to which the old Robin Hood ballads were sung also date from this period. The traditional air for the Chevy Chase ballads dates from the time of Charles I. But from this time on what passed in England for folk-songs were usually nothing but popular songs of the moment, published like any others and sung widely among the middle classes. These songs will be treated in another chapter. For our purpose here we must now skip more than three centuries and come down to the time when the interest in folk-song and folk-dancing began to revive in England. For the recent crop of folk-songs we are indebted to the labors of investigators like Mr. Sharp, patient, painstaking, sympathetic, and admirably equipped in point of musical technique. These men combine the qualities of the artist and the scientist. They have passed quite beyond the attitude of the eighteenth century collectors of folk-poetry--such distinguished men as Bishop Percy and Sir Walter Scott--who did their work out of personal enthusiasm but felt obliged to apologize for the poems they found. (Herder, who worked in Germany about the same time, was the one man who took the modern attitude, which is equally scholarly, scientific, and artistic.) The modern investigators feel their obligations to preserve the songs exactly as they come from the lips of the people. When they publish collections of these songs for popular use they supply accompaniments which are sometimes sophisticated and, in Mr. Sharp’s case, scholarly and delightful. But they seek always to preserve the letter and the spirit of the melodies in their arrangements. Such singers as the Misses Fuller, and Yvette Gilbert and her pupil Miss Loraine Wyman have spread the knowledge of the folk-songs of England and France and have demonstrated the great beauty of them to thousands who had never suspected it.