French popular songs; here are two verses, however, which might have been taken from a Bulgarian pesma.
Votre amant s'est marié
Avec une Flamande;
Elle n'est pas si riche que vous,
Mais elle est plus puissante.
Elle fait venir le soleil
A minuit dans sa chambre,
Elle fait bouiller la marmite
Sans feu et sans rente.
(Puymaigre, p. 31.) This familiarity with the sun and this magical skill are common enough among Bulgarian girls, if one may trust the ballads in M. Dozon's interesting collection. La Maitresse Captive is the French form of the Gay Goss-hawk in the Border Minstrelsy. A girl pretends to be dead, that she may be carried by her kinsmen to the chapel where she is to meet her lover:
Le fils du roi passant par là
Crie tout haut;—Curés, arrêtez,
C'est ma mie que vous emportez,
Ah, laissez moi la regarder.
Il prit ses ciseaux d'or fin
Et décousit ses draps de lin;
Mais pendant qu'il les décousait
Voilà la belle le reconnait.
There has been a good deal of natural scepticism about the ballads which, like the Gay Goss-hawk, were published by Scott. Either he himself or the people who furnished him with copies often dressed up the fragments, and inserted original lines and couplets. It may be taken for almost certain, however, that when Scott gives us a ballad of which variants exist in French, Danish, and Romaic, the groundwork, at least, of that poem is a genuine portion of the popular store common to the people in all European countries. How the store of legends and of poetical formulæ came to be thus the general inheritance of the peasant it is not now possible to guess. Like the problem of the origin and dispersion of märchen, the mystery must be left to Time, "which discovers all things." Did the Scotch borrow The Bonny Hind (giving that appalling song a tragic gloom it does not possess in France) from
