``Yet why a pity?’’ quoth I. ``Is it not true that words are the only things that live forever?  Are we not mortal, and are not books immortal?  Homer’s harp is broken and Horace’s lyre is unstrung, and the voices of the great singers are hushed; but their songs—­their songs are imperishable.  O friend! what moots it to them or to us who gave this epic or that lyric to immortality?  The singer belongs to a year, his song to all time.  I know it is the custom now to credit the author with his work, for this is a utilitarian age, and all things are by the pound or the piece, and for so much money.

``So when a song is printed it is printed in small type, and the name of him who wrote it is appended thereunto in big type.  If the song be meritorious it goes to the corners of the earth through the medium of the art preservative of arts, but the longer and the farther it travels the bigger does the type of the song become and the smaller becomes the type wherein the author’s name is set.

``Then, finally, some inconsiderate hand, wielding the pen or shears, blots out or snips off the poet’s name, and henceforth the song is anonymous.  A great iconoclast—­a royal old iconoclast—­is Time:  but he hath no terrors for those precious things which are embalmed in words, and the only fellow that shall surely escape him till the crack of doom is he whom men know by the name of Anonymous!’’

``Doubtless you speak truly,’’ said the Judge; ``yet it would be different if I but had the ordering of things.  I would let the poets live forever and I would kill off most of their poetry.’’

I do not wonder that Ritson and Percy quarrelled.  It was his misfortune that Ritson quarrelled with everybody.  Yet Ritson was a scrupulously honest man; he was so vulgarly sturdy in his honesty that he would make all folk tell the truth even though the truth were of such a character as to bring the blush of shame to the devil’s hardened cheek.

On the other hand, Percy believed that there were certain true things which should not be opened out in the broad light of day; it was this deep-seated conviction which kept him from publishing the manuscript folio, a priceless treasure, which Ritson never saw and which, had it fallen in Ritson’s way instead of Percy’s, would have been clapped at once into the hands of the printer.

How fortunate it is for us that we have in our time so great a scholar as Francis James Child, so enamored of balladry and so learned in it, to complete and finish the work of his predecessors.  I count myself happy that I have heard from the lips of this enthusiast several of the rarest and noblest of the old British and old Scottish ballads; and I recall with pride that he complimented me upon my spirited vocal rendering of ``Burd Isabel and Sir Patrick,’’ ``Lang Johnny More,’’ ``The Duke o’ Gordon’s Daughter,’’ and two or three other famous songs which I had learned while sojourning among the humbler classes in the North of England.