The words that have had the best chance of coming down to us intact on the stream of ballad-verse, or with only such marks of attrition and wear as might be caused by time and a rough channel, are those to which the popular mind of a later day has been unable to attach any definite meaning; for instance, certain names of places and houses, titles and functions, snatches of refrains, phrases reminiscent of otherwise forgotten primaeval or mediaeval customs and the like. These remain bedded like fossils in the more recent deposits, and form a curious study, for those who have time to enter into it, in the archaeology and palaeontology of the ballad. _Childe Rowland_, _Hynde Horn_, _Kempion_, furnish us with words, drawn from the language of Gothic and Norman chivalry, that must have dropped out of the common speech long before the ballads began to be regularly collected and printed. They recall the gentleness and courtesy, as well as the courage, that were supposed to be attributes of the 'most perfect goodly knight'--attributes in which, sooth to say, the typical knight of the Scottish ballad is not always a pattern. _Kempion_--'Kaempe' or Champion Owayne--is supposed to perpetuate the name of 'Owain-ap-Urien, King of Reged,' celebrated by Taliessin and the other early Welsh bards. And this is by no means the only instance in which ballads appear to have distilled the spirit and blended names and stories out of both Celtic and Teutonic legend. Thus _Glasgerion_, which in the best-known Scottish version has become _Glenkindie_, has been translated as _Glas-keraint_--Geraint, the Blue Bard--an Orpheus among the Brythons, whose chief legendary sites, according to Mr. Skene, Professor Rhys, and other authorities, are to be sought in Scotland and its borderlands. The fame of this harper, who, like Glenkindie, could 'wile the fish from the flood,' came down to the times of Chaucer and Gavin Douglas, and was by them passed on; the former mentions him in his _House of Fame_ along with Chiron and Orion, 'And other Harpers many one, With the Briton, Glasgerion.' It is not too much to conjecture that it was remembered also in popular poetry; and these and other classical writers of the Middle Ages, who despised not the common folk and their ways, no doubt drank deeply of knowledge and inspiration from the clear and hidden well of English poetry and romance even then existing in ballad lore. In fact, it seems as probable that the prose and metrical romances of chivalry have been derived from the folk-songs they resemble, as that the ballads have been borrowed from the romances; perhaps both owe their descent to a common and forgotten ancestor.