Produced by John B. Hare A BOOK OF OLD ENGLISH BALLADS With an Accompaniment of Decorative Drawings By George Wharton Edwards And an Introduction by Hamilton W. Mabie [1896] CONTENTS Introduction Chevy Chace King Cophetua and the Beggar-Maid King Leir and his Three Daughters Fair Rosamond Phillida and Corydon Fair Margaret and Sweet William Annan Water The Bailiff's Daughter of Islington Barbara Allen's Cruelty The Douglas Tragedy Young Waters Flodden Field Helen of Kirkconnell Robin Hood and Allen-a-Dale Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne Robin Hood's Death and Burial The Twa Corbies Waly, Waly, Love be Bonny The Nut-brown Maid The Fause Lover The Mermaid The Battle of Otterburn The Lament of the Border Widow The Banks o' Yarrow Hugh of Lincoln Sir Patrick Spens Introduction Goethe, who saw so many things with such clearness of vision, brought out the charm of the popular ballad for readers of a later day in his remark that the value of these songs of the people is to be found in the fact that their motives are drawn directly from nature; and he added, that in the art of saying things compactly, uneducated men have greater skill than those who are educated. It is certainly true that no kind of verse is so completely out of the atmosphere of modern writing as the popular ballad. No other form of verse has, therefore, in so great a degree, the charm of freshness. In material, treatment, and spirit, these bat lads are set in sharp contrast with the poetry of the hour. They deal with historical events or incidents, with local traditions, with personal adventure or achievement. They are, almost without exception, entirely objective. Contemporary poetry is, on the other hand, very largely subjective; and even when it deals with events or incidents it invests them to such a degree with personal emotion and imagination, it so modifies and colours them with temperamental effects, that the resulting poem is much more a study of subjective conditions than a picture or drama of objective realities. This projection of the inward upon the outward world, in such a degree that the dividing line between the two is lost, is strikingly illustrated in Maeterlinck's plays. Nothing could be in sharper contrast, for instance, than the famous ballad of "The Hunting of the Cheviot" and Maeterlinck's "Princess Maleine." There is no atmosphere, in a strict use of the word, in the spirited and compact account of the famous contention between the Percies and the Douglases, of which Sir Philip Sidney said "that I found not my heart moved more than with a Trumpet." It is a breathless, rushing narrative of a swift succession of events, told with the most straight-forward simplicity. In the "Princess Maleine," on the other hand, the