But it may be objected that among Ballads no such thing as chronological order is possible; and that, if it were, I have not attempted it. ‘Why then did I not boldly mix up all my flowers in a heap and afterwards sit down to re-arrange them, disregarding history, studious only that one flower should set off another and the whole wreath be a well-balanced circle?’ I will try to answer this, premising only that tact is nine-tenths of the anthologist’s business. It is very true that the Ballads have no chronology: that no one can say when _Hynd Horn_ was composed, or assert with proof that _Clerk Saunders_ is younger than _Childe Maurice_ or _Tam Lin_ older than _Sir Patrick Spens_, though that all five are older than _The Children in the Wood_ no one with an ounce of literary sense would deny. Even of our few certainties we have to remember that, where almost everything depends on oral tradition, it may easily happen--in fact happens not seldom--that a really old ballad ‘of the best period’ has reached us late and in a corrupted form, its original gold overlaid with silver and bronze. It is true, moreover, that these pages, declining an impossible order, decline also the pretence to it. I have arranged the ballads in seven books: of which the first deals with Magic, the ‘Seely Court’, and the supernatural; the second (and on the whole the most beautiful) with stories of absolute romance such as _Childe Waters_, _Lord Ingram_, _Young Andrew_; the third with romance shading off into real history, as in _Sir Patrick Spens_, _Hugh of Lincoln_, _The Queen’s Marie_; the fourth with Early Carols and ballads of Holy Writ. This closes Part I. The fifth book is all of the Greenwood and Robin Hood; the sixth follows history down from Chevy Chase and the Homeric deeds of Douglas and Percy to less renowned if not less spirited Border feuds; while the seventh and last book presents the Ballad in various aspects of false beginning and decline--_The Old Cloak_, which deserved a long line of children but in fact has had few; _Barbara Allen_, late but exquisite; _Lord Lovel_, which is silly sooth; and _The Suffolk Tragedy_, wherein a magnificent ballad-theme is ambled to market like so much butter. My hope is that this arrangement, while it avoids mixing up things that differ and keeps consorted those (the Robin Hood Ballads for example) which naturally go together, does ‘in round numbers’ give a view of the Ballad in its perfection and decline, and that so my book may be useful to the student as well as to the disinterested lover of poetry for whom it is chiefly intended.