easy and flows along trippingly from the tongue with such regular emphasis and cadence as to lead instinctively to a sort of sing-song in the recital of it.  Ballads are more frequently written in common metre lines of eight and six syllables alternating.  Such is the famous ballad of “Chevy Chace,"[5] which has been growing in popular esteem for more than three hundred years.  Ben Jonson used to say he would rather have been the author of it than of all his works.  Sir Philip Sidney, in his discourse on poetry, says of it:  “I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglass that I found not my heart more moved than with a trumpet.”  Addison wrote an elaborate review of it in the seventieth and seventy-fourth numbers of the Spectator.  He there demonstrates that this old ballad has all the elements in it of the loftiest existing epic.  The moral is the same as that of the Iliad: 

  “God save the king and bless the land
    In plenty, joy and peace
  And grant henceforth that foul debate
    Twixt noblemen may cease.”

Addison, in Number 85 of the Spectator, also commends that beautiful and touching ballad denominated “The Children in the Wood.”  He observes, “This song is a plain, simple copy of nature, destitute of the helps and ornaments of art.  The tale of it is a pretty, tragical story and pleases for no other reason than because it is a copy of nature.”  It is known to every child as a nursery song or a pleasant story.  A stanza or two will reveal its pathos and rhythm.  The children had been committed by their dying parents to their uncle: 

  The parents being dead and gone
    The children home he takes,
  And brings them straite unto his house
    Where much of them he makes. 
  He had kept these pretty babes
    A twelve month and a daye
  But for their wealth he did desire
    To make them both away

An assassin is hired to kill them; he leaves them in a deep forest: 

  These pretty babes with hand in hand
    Went wandering up and downe;
  But never more could see the man
    Approaching from the town: 
  Their pretty lippes with black-berries
    Were all besmeared and dyed
  And when they saw the darksome night
    They sat them down and cried. 
  Thus wandered these poor innocents
    Till death did end their grief,
  In one another’s armes they dyed
    As wanting due relief;
  No burial this pretty pair
    Of any man receives
  Till robin red-breast piously
    Did cover them with leaves.

There is a famous story book written by Richard Johnson in the reign of Elizabeth, entitled, “The Seven Champions of Christendom."[6]

The popular English ballad of “St. George and the Dragon,” is founded on one of the narratives of this book, and the story in the book on a still older ballad, or legend, styled “Sir Bevis of Hampton.”  This, too, resembles very much Ovid’s account of the slaughter of the dragon by Cadmus.  In the legend of Sir Bevis the fight is thus described: