which they have been handed from one ignorant reciter to another; each discarding whatever original words or phrases time or fashion had, in his opinion, rendered obsolete, and substituting anachronisms by expressions taken from the customs of his own day. And here it may be remarked, that the desire of the reciter to be intelligible, however natural and laudable, has been one of the greatest causes of the deterioration of ancient poetry. The minstrel who endeavoured to recite with fidelity the words of the author, might indeed fall into errors of sound and sense, and substitute corruptions for words he did not understand. But the ingenuity of a skilful critic could often, in that case, revive and restore the original meaning; while the corrupted words became, in such cases, a warrant for the authenticity of the whole poem.1

1 An instance occurs in the valuable old ballad, called Auld Maitland. The reciter repeated a verse, descriptive of the defence of a castle, thus:

"With spring-wall, stanes, and goads of airn
Among them fast he threw."

Spring-wall, is a corruption of springald, a military engine

In general, however, the later reciters appear to have been far less desirous to speak the author's words, than to introduce amendments and new readings of their own, which have always produced the effect of modernizing, and usually that of degrading and vulgarizing, the rugged sense and spirit of the antique minstrel. Thus, undergoing from age to age a gradual process of alteration and recomposition, our popular and oral minstrelsy has lost, in a great measure, its original appearance; and the strong touches by which it had been formerly characterised have been generally smoothed down and destroyed by a process similar to that by which a coin, passing from hand to hand, loses in circulation all the finer marks of the impress.

The very fine ballad of Chevy Chase is an example of this degrading species of alchymy, by which the ore of antiquity is deteriorated and adulterated. While Addison, in an age which had never attended to popular poetry, wrote his

for casting darts or stones; the restoration of which reading gives a precise and clear sense to the lines

classical criticism on that ballad, he naturally took for his text the ordinary stall-copy, although he might, and ought to have suspected, that a ditty couched in the language nearly of his own time, could not be the same with that which Sir Philip Sidney, more than one hundred years before, had spoken of, as being "evil apparelled in the dust and cobwebs of an uncivilized age." The venerable Bishop Percy was the first to correct this mistake, by producing a copy of the song, as old at least as the reign of Henry VII., bearing the name of the author, or transcriber, Richard Sheale.1 But even the Rev. Editor himself fell under the mistake of supposing the modern Chevy Chase to be a new copy of the original ballad, expressly modernized by some one later bard. On the contrary, the current version is now universally allowed to have been produced by the gradual alterations of numerous reciters, during two centuries, in the course of which the ballad has been gradually moulded into a composition bearing only a general re

1 See Percy's Reliques, vol. i. p. 2.

semblance to the original-expressing the same events and sentiments in much smoother language, and more flowing and easy versification; but losing in poetical fire and energy, and in the vigour and pithiness of the expression, a great deal more than it has gained in suavity of diction. Thus:

"The Percy owt of Northumberland,
And a vowe to God mayd he,

That he wolde hunte in the mountayns
Off Cheviot within dayes thre,
In the mauger of doughty Dougles,
And all that ever with him be,"

Becomes,

"The stout Earl of Northumberland

A vow to God did make,

His pleasure in the Scottish woods

Three summer days to take," &c.

From this, and other examples of the same kind, of which many might be quoted, we must often expect to find the remains of Minstrel poetry, composed originally for the courts of princes and halls of nobles, disguised in the more modern and vulgar dialect in which they have been of late sung to the frequenters of the rustic ale-bench.

It is unnecessary to mention more than one other remarkable and humbling instance, printed in the curious collection entitled, a Ballad Book, where we find, in the words of the ingenious Editor,1 a stupid ballad printed as it was sung in Annandale, founded on the well-known story of the Prince of Salerno's daughter, but with the uncouth change of Dysmal for Ghismonda, and Guiscard transformed into a greasy kitchen-boy.

"To what base uses may we not return!"

Sometimes a still more material and systematic difference appears between the poems of antiquity, as they were originally composed, and as they now exist. the longer metrical romances, which were in fashion during the middle ages, were reduced to shorter compositions, in order that they might be chanted before an inferior audience. A ballad, for example, of Thomas of Erceldoune, and his intrigues with the Queen of Faery-Land, is, or

This occurs in cases where

1[Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, Esq. The Ballad-Book was printed in 1823, and inscribed to Sir Walter Scott; the impression consisting of only thirty copies.]