otherwise?  The old ballads were everything which the eighteenth century was not.  They were rough and wild, where that was smooth and tame; they dealt, with fierce sincerity, in the elementary passions of human nature.  They did not moralize, or philosophize, or sentimentalize; were never subtle, intellectual, or abstract.  They were plain English, without finery or elegance.  They had certain popular mannerisms, but none of the conventional figures of speech or rhetorical artifices like personifications, periphrasis, antithesis, and climax so dear to the Augustan heart.  They were intent on the story—­not on the style—­and they just told it and let it go for what it was worth.

Moreover, there are ballads and ballads.  The best of them are noble in expression as well as feeling, unequaled by anything in our medieval poetry outside of Chaucer; unequaled by Chaucer himself in point of intensity, in occasional phrases of a piercing beauty: 

    “The swans-fethers that his arrowe bar
    With his hart-blood they were wet."[42]

    “O cocks are crowing a merry mid-larf,
      A wat the wild fule boded day;
    The salms of Heaven will be sung,
      And ere now I’ll be missed away."[43]

    “If my love were an earthly knight,
      As he’s an elfin gray,
    A wad na gie my sin true love
      For no lord that ye hae."[44]

    “She hang ae napkin at the door,
      Another in the ha,
    And a’ to wipe the trickling tears,
      Sae fast as they did fa."[45]

    “And all is with one chyld of yours,
      I feel stir at my side: 
    My gowne of green, it is too strait: 
      Before it was too wide."[46]

Verse of this quality needs no apology.  But of many of the ballads, Dennis’ taunt, repeated by Dr. Johnson, is true; they are not merely rude, but weak and creeping in style.  Percy knew that the best of them would savor better to the palates of his contemporaries if he dressed them with modern sauces.  Yet he must have loved them, himself, in their native simplicity, and it seems almost incredible that he could have spoken as he did about Prior’s insipid paraphrase of the “Nut Brown Maid.”  “If it had no other merit,” he says of that most lovely ballad, “than the having afforded the ground-work to Prior’s ‘Henry and Emma,’ this ought to preserve it from oblivion.”  Prior was a charming writer of epigram, society verse, and the humorous conte in the manner of La Fontaine; but to see how incapable he was of the depth and sweetness of romantic poetry, compare a few lines of the original with the “hubbub of words” in his modernized version, in heroic couplets: 

    “O Lord, what is this worldes blisse
    That changeth as the mone! 
    The somer’s day in lusty May
    Is derked before the none. 
    I hear you say farewel.  Nay, nay,
    We departe not so soon: 
    Why say ye so?  Wheder wyle ye goo? 
    Alas! what have ye done? 
    Alle my welfare to sorrow and care
    Shulde change if ye were gon;
    For in my minde, of all mankynde,
    I love but you alone.”