Mary Stuart. So late a ballad would have been more historical and less poetical. The lady was executed in Russia in 1719. Burns quotes a verse of the ballad in 1790. Could eighteen very diverse variants have been made of a ballad on a contemporary event, in less than a century? Perhaps no ballad has so many variants; one of them even enables the lover to save the lady’s life. I cannot believe that this mass of myths is the growth of part of the last century, nor sprung from an event in a distant though contemporary court. But Mr. Child seems to think this the only tenable opinion, and it is certainly curious that the lady seems to be dying across seas far from home. But her parents might have been in France, or might have lived near a Scotch seaport, hence her address to the mariners, which, itself, has a parallel in a Romaic ballad.
The problems of Folk-Lore are infinite. We have only guessed at a few of them, and, perhaps, have only demonstrated that we are likely to go on guessing. But that is a very old form of the sport; and, if the Philistines mock us, it may be by an inherited distaste, for Samson, when it came to guessing riddles, had the better of the Philistines.
Discussion.
Mr. Nutt drew the attention of the meeting to Jeanroy’s theory of the origins of the ballad literature of modern Western Europe as derived from mediæval French lyric poetry, which has now disappeared, but the existence of which was postulated by the author in order to account for folk-poesy.
Mr. Gomme thought it was a good thing once a year, in taking stock of our progress, to hear objections to our methods, instead of being content with compliments. But objections raised, even by the great authority of our President, need not off-hand be considered as objections proved. He (Mr. Gomme) was concerned chiefly with two subjects, one a personal one, the other a general one. The President had done him the honour of specially criticising his paper on “Totemism in Britain.” The President objected to some of his
