of the ballads which have come down to us.  Scandinavia kept the old heroic lays (Kaempeviser); Germany wove them into her epic, as witness the Nibelungen Lay; but England and Scotland have none of them in any shape.  So, too, the mythic ballad, scantily represented in English, and practically unknown in Germany, abounds in Scandinavian collections.  The Faroe Islands and Norway, as Grundtvig tells us, show the best record for ballads preserved by oral tradition; while noble ladies of Denmark, three or four centuries ago, did high service to ballad literature by making collections in manuscript of the songs current then in the castle as in the cottage.

For England, one is compelled to begin the list of known ballads with the thirteenth century.  ‘The Battle of Maldon,’ composed in the last decade of the tenth century, though spirited enough and full of communal vigor, has no stanzaic structure, follows in metre and style the rules of the Old English epic, and is only a ballad by courtesy; about the ballads used a century or two later by historians of England, we can do nothing but guess; and there is no firm ground under the critic’s foot until he comes to the Robin Hood ballads, which Professor Child assigns to the thirteenth century.  ‘The Battle of Otterburn’ (1388) opens a series of ballads based on actual events and stretching into the eighteenth century.  Barring the Robin Hood cycle,—­an epic constructed from this attractive material lies before us in the famous ’Gest of Robin Hood,’ printed as early as 1489,—­the chief sources of the collector are the Percy Manuscript, “written just before 1650,”—­on which, not without omissions and additions, the bishop based his ‘Reliques,’ first published in 1765,—­and the oral traditions of Scotland, which Professor Child refers to “the last one hundred and thirty years.”  Information about the individual ballads, their sources, history, literary connections, and above all, their varying texts, must be sought in the noble work of Professor F.J.  Child.  For present purposes, a word or two of general information must suffice.  As to origins, there is a wide range.  The church furnished its legend, as in ‘St. Stephen’; romance contributed the story of ‘Thomas Rymer’; and the light, even cynical fabliau is responsible for ’The Boy and the Mantle.’  Ballads which occur in many tongues either may have a common origin or else may owe their manifold versions, as in the case of popular tales, to a love of borrowing; and here, of course, we get the hint of wider issues.  For the most part, however, a ballad tells some moving story, preferably of fighting and of love.  Tragedy is the dominant note; and English ballads of the best type deal with those elements of domestic disaster so familiar in the great dramas of literature, in the story of Orestes, or of Hamlet, or of the Cid.  Such are ‘Edward,’ ‘Lord Randal,’ ‘The Two Brothers,’ ‘The Two Sisters,’ ‘Child Maurice,’ ‘Bewick and Graham,’ ‘Clerk Colven,’ ’Little Musgrave