Will men say, ‘The later the ballad, the more it is altered in oral tradition’? If so, let them, by all means, produce examples! We should, on this theory, have about a dozen ‘Battles of Philiphaugh,’ and at least fifteen ‘Bothwell Brigs,’ a poem, by the way, much in the old manner, prosaically applied, and so recent that, in art at least, it was produced after the death of the Duke of Monmouth, slain, it avers, by the machinations of Claverhouse! Of course we are not asking for exact proportions, since many variants of ballads may be lost, but merely for proof that, the later a ballad is, the more variants of it occur. But this contention is probably impossible, and the numerous variations in ‘The Queen’s Marie’ are really a proof of long existence in oral tradition, and contradict the theory espoused by Mr. Child, who later saw the difficulty involved in his hypothesis. This argument, though statistical, is, we think, conclusive, and the other considerations which we have produced in favour of the antiquity of ‘The Queen’s Marie’ add their cumulative weight. We have been, in brief, invited to suppose that, about 1719, a Scot wrote a ballad on an event in contemporary Russian Court life; that (contrary to use and wont) he threw the story back a century and a half; that he was a master of an old style, in the practice of his age utterly obsolete and not successfully imitated; that his poem became universally popular, and underwent, in eighty years, even more vicissitudes than most other ballads encounter in three or five centuries. Meanwhile it is certain that there had been real ancient ballads, contemporary with the Marian events--ballads on the very Maries two or three of whom appear in the so-called poem of 1719; while exactly the same sort of scandal as the ballad records had actually occurred at Queen Mary’s Court in a lower social rank. The theory of Mr. Child is opposed to our whole knowledge of ballad literature, of its age, decadence (about 1620-1700), and decease (in the old kind) as a popular art.