To agree with Mr. Child, we must not only accept one great ballad-poet, born at least fifty years too late; we must not only admit that such a poet would throw back his facts for a century and a half; but we must also conceive that the balladising humour, with its ancient methods, was even more vivacious in Scotland for many years after 1719 than, as far as we know, it had ever been before. Yet there is no other trace known to us of the existence of the old balladising humour and of the old art in all that period. We have no such ballad about the English captain shot by the writer’s pretty wife, none about the bewitched son of Lord Torphichen, none about the Old Chevalier, or Lochiel, or Prince Charlie: we have merely Shenstone’s ‘Jemmy Dawson’ and the Glasgow bellman’s rhymed history of Prince Charles. In fact, ‘Jemmy Dawson’ is a fair instantia contradictoria as far as a ballad by a man of letters is to the point. Such a ballad that age could indeed produce: it is not very like ‘The Queen’s Marie’! No, we cannot take refuge in ‘Townley’s Ghost’ and his address to the Butcher Cumberland:-- Imbrued in bliss, imbathed in case, Though now thou seem’st to lie, My injured form shall gall thy peace, And make thee wish to die! THAT is a ballad of the eighteenth century, and it is not in the manner of ‘The Queen’s Marie.’ These considerations, now so obvious to a student of the art of old popular poetry, if he thinks of the matter, could not occur to Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe. He was a great collector of ballads, but not versed in, or interested in, their ‘aesthetic’--in the history and evolution of ballad-making. Mr. Child, on the other hand, was the Grimm or Kohler of popular English and Scottish poetry. Our objections to his theory could scarcely have been collected in such numbers, without the aid of his own assortment of eighteen versions or fragments, with more lectiones variae. But he has not allowed for the possible, the constantly occurring, chance of coincidence between fancy and fact; nor, perhaps, has he reflected on the changed condition of ballad poetry in the eighteenth century, on the popular love of a new song about a new event, and on the entire lack of evidence (as far as I am aware) for the existence of ballad-poets in the old manner during the reign of George I. The ballad-reading public of 1719 would have revelled in a fresh ballad of a Scottish lass, recently betrayed, tortured, and slain far away by a Russian tyrant. A fresh ballad on Queen Mary’s Court, done in the early obsolete manner, would, on the other hand, have had comparatively little charm for the ballad-buying lieges in 1719. The ballad-poet had thus in 1719 no temptation to be ‘archaistic,’ like Mr. Rossetti, and to sing of old times. He had, on the contrary, every inducement to indite a ‘rare new ballad’ on the last tragic scandal, with its poignant details, as of Peter kissing the dead girl’s head.