le farther to the south. For example, nowhere in England does
the old folk-play which enacts the combats of St. George with his Saracen
adversaries enjoy such popularity as in the upper waters of the Calder
Valley and in busy Rochdale over the border. This play, known locally as
"The Peace [or Pasque, i.e. Easter] Egg," was once acted all over
England. Driven from the country-side, where old traditions usually live
the longest, it survives amid the smoke-laden atmosphere of cotton-mills
and in towns which pride themselves, not without reason, on their love of
progress and their readiness to receive new ideas. It is, for our
purpose, unfortunate that this fine old play preserves little of the
local dialect and is therefore excluded from this anthology.(7) Apart
from "The Peace Egg," it is the remote Cleveland country in the North
Riding in which the old traditional poetry of Yorkshire has been best
preserved. This is the land of the sword-dance, the bridal-garter, and
the "mell- supper," the land in which primitive faiths and traditions
survive with strange tenacity. The late Canon Atkinson has made this
land familiar to us by his fascinating Forty Years in a Moorland Parish,
and, to the lover of traditional dialect songs, an even greater service
has been rendered by a later gleaner in this harvest-field, Mr. Richard
Blakeborough of Norton-on-Tees, whose T' Hunt o' Yatton Brigg has already
been considered. In his supplement to the little volume which contains
that poem, and again in his highly instructive and entertaining Wit,
Character, Folklore, and Customs of the North Riding of Yorkshire, Mr.
Blakeborough has brought together a number of traditional songs and
proverbial rhymes of great interest, and, to some extent at least, of
high antiquity. Many of these have been collected by him among the
peasantry, others are taken from a manuscript collection of notes on
North Riding folklore made by a certain George Calvert early in the
nineteenth century, and now in Mr. Blakeborough's possession.

Of the first importance in this anthology of traditional song are the
"Cleveland Lyke-wake Dirge" and "A Dree Neet." The former has been well
known to lovers of poetry since Sir Walter Scott included it in his
Border Minstrelsy; the latter, I believe, was never published until the
appearance of T' Hunt o' Yatton Brigg in 1896. The tragic power and
suggestiveness of these two poems is very remarkable. It is, I think,
fairly