COLLECTANEA.
Literary Influences on Tradition.
The influence of recorded literature on the English Ballad presents a problem which is very complicated. Similarity between recorded literature and tradition may be due to an independent choice of the same or similar themes, for "Chevy Chase" could have equally engaged the attention of the chronicler as it did that of the ballad folk. In the case of one work of recorded literature influencing another the question of priority is speedily settled because we know the dates of their production. Difficulty in deciding the question of priority, may, however, arise when the dates of composition almost coincide, as in the case of the Shakesperean lectures of Coleridge and Schlegel.
In the case of the ballad definite chronological fact can seldom be established, and therefore unless one can prove the particular ballad in question to have been extant previous to the literary work it resembles, no definite conclusion can well be arrived at. In a note on the ballad of King Arthur and King Cornwall Child proceeds to investigate this problem, as follows:
"The Färöe ballad is thought to show traces in some places of Christiern Pedersen's edition of the Danish Chronicle, 1534, or of stall prints founded on that. This does not, however, necessarily put the ballad into the sixteenth century. Might not Pedersen have had ballad authority for such changes and additions as he made } It may well be supposed that he had, and if what is peculiar to Pedersen may have come from ballads, we must hesitate to derive the ballads from Pedersen. It is, moreover, neither strange nor unexampled that popular ballads should be affected by tradition committed to print as well as
