In common with his literary associates, Southey was prompted by Percy’s “Reliques” to try his hand at the legendary ballad and at longer metrical tales like “All for Love” and “The Pilgrim to Compostella.”  Most of these pieces date from the last years of the century.  One of them, “St. Patrick’s Purgatory,” was inserted by Lewis in his “Tales of Wonder.”  Another of the most popular, and a capital specimen of grotesque, “The Old Woman of Berkeley,” was upon a theme which was also undertaken by Taylor of Norwich and Dr. Sayers of the same city, when Southey was on a visit to the former in 1798.  The story, told by Olaus Magnus as well as by William of Malmesbury, was of a witch whose body was carried off by the devil, though her coffin had been sprinkled with holy water and bound with a triple chain.  For material Southey drew upon Spanish chronicles, French fabliaux, the “Acta Sanctorum,” Matthew of Westminster, and many other sources.  His ballads do not compare well with those of Scott and Coleridge.  They abound in the supernatural—­miracles of saints, sorceries, and apparitions; but the matter-of-fact narrative, common-place diction, and jog-trot verse are singularly out of keeping with the subject matter.  The most wildly romantic situations become tamely unromantic under Southey’s handling.  Though in better taste than Lewis’ grisly compositions, yet, as in Lewis, the want of “high seriousness” or any finer imagination in these legendary tales makes them turn constantly towards the comic; so that Southey was scandalised to learn that Mr. Payne Collier had taken his “Old Woman of Berkeley” for a “mock ballad” or parody.  He affected especially a stanza which he credited to Lewis’ invention: 

  “Behind a wide column, half breathless with fear
    She crept to conceal herself there;
  That instant the moon o’er a dark cloud shone clear,
  And she saw in the moonlight two ruffians appear,
    And between them a corpse did they bear.” [5]

Southey employs no archaisms, no refrains, nor any of the stylistic marks of ancient minstrelsy.  His ballads have the metrical roughness and plain speech of the old popular ballads, but none of their frequent, peculiar beauties of thought and phrase,

Spain, no less than Germany and Italy, was laid under contribution by the English romantics.  Southey’s work in this direction was followed by such things as Lockhart’s “Spanish Ballads” (1824), Irving’s “Alhambra,” and Bryant’s and Longfellow’s translations from Spanish lyrical poetry.  But these exotics did not stimulate original creative activity in England in equal degree with the German and Italian transplantings.  They were imported, not appropriated.  Of all European countries Spain had remained the most Catholic and mediaeval.  Her eight centuries of struggle against the Moors had given her a rich treasure of legendary song and story.  She had a body of popular ballad poetry larger than either England’s or Germany’s.[6]