It was no easy matter to choose a group of representative ballads from among so many almost equally fine and equally damaged with thin places. Finally, it seemed best to take, from among the finest, those that had passages of genius—a line here and there of surpassing imagination and poetry—rare in even the best folk-songs. Such passages do not occur but in ballads that are throughout on the level of the highest of their kind. ‘None but my foe to be my guide’ so distinguishes _Helen of Kirconnell_; the exquisite stanza about the hats of birk, _The Wife of Usher’s Well_; its varied refrain, _The Dowie Dens of Yarrow_; the stanza spoken by Margaret asking for room in the grave, _Sweet William and Margaret_; and a number of passages, _Sir Patrick Spens_, such as that beginning, ‘I saw the new moon late yestreen,’ the stanza beginning ‘O laith, laith were our gude Scots lords,’ and almost all the stanzas following. _A Lyke Wake Dirge_ is of surpassing quality throughout. I am sorry to have no room for Jamieson’s version of _Fair Annie_, for _Edom o’ Gordon_, for _The Dæmon Lover_, for _Edward_, _Edward_, and for the Scottish edition of _The Battle of Otterbourne_. MRS. ANNE KILLIGREW.—Page 205. This most majestic ode—one of the few greatest of its kind—is a model of noble rhythm and especially of cadence. To print it whole would be impossible, and one of the very few excisions in this book is made in the midst of it. Dryden, so adult and so far from simplicity, bears himself like a child who, having said something fine, caps it with something foolish. The suppressed part of the ode is silly with a silliness which Dryden’s age chose to dodder in when it would. The deplorable ‘rattling bones’ of the closing section has a touch of it. SONG, FROM ABDELAZAR.—Page 209. It is a futile thing—and the cause of a train of futilities—to hail ‘style’ as though it were a separable quality in literature, and it is not in that illusion that the style of the opening of Aphra Behn’s resounding song is to be praised. But it _is_ the style—implying the reckless and majestic heart—that first takes the reader of these great verses. HYMN.—Page 209. Whether Addison wrote the whole of this or not,—and it seems that the inspired passages are none of his—it is to me a poem of genius, magical in spite of the limited diction. ELEGY TO THE MEMORY OF AN UNFORTUNATE LADY.—Page 210. Also in spite of limited diction—the sign of thought closing in, as it did fast close in during those years—are Pope’s tenderness and passion communicated in this beautiful elegy. It would not be too much to say that all his passion, all his tenderness, and certainly all his mystery, are in the few lines at the opening and close. The _Epistle of Eloisa_ is (artistically speaking) but a counterfeit. Yet Pope’s _Elegy_ begins by stealing and translating into the false elegance of altered taste that lovely and poetic opening of Ben Jonson’s—