named, as well as “Lady Anne Bothwell’s Lament” and “Fair Margaret and Sweet William,"[34] was quoted in Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Knight of the Burning Pestle,” (1611).  Scraps of them are sung by one of the dramatis personae, old Merrythought, whose speciality is a damnable iteration of ballad fragments.  References to old ballads are numerous in the Elizabethan plays.  Percy devoted the second book of his first series to “Ballads that Illustrate Shakspere.”  In the seventeenth century a few ballads were printed entire in poetic miscellanies entitled “Garlands,” higgledy-piggledy with pieces of all kinds.  Professor Child enumerates nine ballad collections before Percy’s.  The only ones of any importance among these were “A Collection of Old Ballads” (Vols I. and II. in 1723, Vol III.  In 1725), ascribed to Ambrose Philips; and the Scotch poet, Allan Ramsay’s, “Tea Table Miscellany,” (in 4 vols., 1714-40) and “Evergreen” (2 vols., 1724).  The first of these collections was illustrated with copperplate engravings and supplied with introductions which were humorous in intention.  The editor treated his ballads as trifles, though he described them as “corrected from the best and most ancient copies extant”; and said that Homer himself was nothing more than a blind ballad-singer, whose songs had been subsequently joined together and formed into an epic poem.  Ramsay’s ballads were taken in part from a manuscript collection of some eight hundred pages, made by George Bannatyne about 1570 and still preserved in the Advocates’ Library at Edinburgh.

In Nos. 70, 74, and 85, of the Spectator, Addison had praised the naturalness and simplicity of the popular ballads, selecting for special mention “Chevy Chase”—­the later version—­“which,” he wrote, “is the favorite ballad of the common people of England; and Ben Jonson used to say he had rather have been the author of it than of all his works”; and “the ‘Two Children in the Wood,’ which is one of the darling songs of the common people, and has been the delight of most Englishmen in some part of their age.”  Addison justifies his liking for these humble poems by classical precedents.  “The greatest modern critics have laid it down as a rule that an heroic poem should be founded upon some important precept of morality adapted to the constitution of the country in which the poet writes.  Homer and Virgil have formed their plans in this view.”  Accordingly he thinks that the author of “Chevy Chase” meant to point a moral as to the mischiefs of private war.  As if it were not precisely the gaudium certaminis that inspired the old border ballad-maker!  As if he did not glory in the fight!  The passage where Earl Percy took the dead Douglas by the hand and lamented his fallen foe reminds Addison of Aeneas’ behavior toward Lausus.  The robin red-breast covering the children with leaves recalls to his mind a similar touch in one of Horace’s odes.  But it was much that Addison, whose own verse was so artificial, should