Lockhart’s “Spanish Ballads,” which were bold and spirited paraphrases rather than close versions of the originals, enjoyed a great success, and have been repeatedly reprinted.  Ticknor pronounced them undoubtedly a work of genius, as much so as any book of the sort in any literature with which he was acquainted.[14] In the very same year Sir John Bowring published his “Ancient Poetry and Romance of Spain.”  Hookham Frere, that most accomplished of translators, also gave specimens from the “Romancero.”  Of late years versions in increasing numbers of Spanish poetry of all kinds, ancient and modern, by Ormsby, Gibson, and others too numerous to name, have made the literature of the country largely accessible to English readers.  But to Lockhart belongs the credit of having established for the English public the convention of romantic Spain—­the Spain of lattice and guitar, of mantilla and castanet, articles now long at home in the property room of romance, along with the gondola of Venice, the “clock-face” troubadour, and the castle on the Rhine.  The Spanish brand of mediaevalism would seem, for a number of years, to have substituted itself in England for the German, and doubtless a search through the annuals and gift books and fashionable fiction and minor poetry generally, of the years from 1825 to 1840, would disclose a decided Castilian colouring.  To such effect, at least, is the testimony of the Edinburgh reviewer—­from whom I have several times quoted—­reviewing in January, 1841, the new and sumptuously illustrated edition of “Ancient Spanish Ballads.”  “Mr. Lockhart’s success,” he writes, “rendered the subject fashionable; we have, however, no space to bestow on the minor fry who dabbled in these . . . fountains.  Those who remember their number may possibly deprecate our re-opening the floodgates of the happily subsided inundation.”

The popular ballad, indeed, is, next after the historical romance, the literary form to which the romantic movement has given, in the highest degree, a renewal of prosperous life.  Every one has written ballads, and the “burden” has become a burden even as the grasshopper is such.  The very parodists have taken the matter in hand.  The only Calverley made excellent sport of the particular variety cultivated by Jean Ingelow.  And Sir Frederick Pollock, as though actuated by Lowell’s hint, about “a declaration of love under the forms of a declaration in trover,” cast the law reports into ballad phrase in his “Leading Cases Done into English (1876): 

  “It was Thomas Newman and five his feres
  (Three more would have made them nine),
  And they entered into John Vaux’s house,
  That had the Queen’s Head to sign. 
  The birds on the bough sing loud and sing low,
  What trespass shall be ab initio.”