,
we notice, and the kiss was demanded by her and refused by him: and
Clerk Sanders is only disturbed in his grave because he has not got back
his troth-plight. The method of giving this back--the stroking of a
wand--we have had before in _The Brown Girl_ (First Series, pp. 60-62,
st. 14).

In the Helgi cycle of Early Western epics (_Corpus Poeticum Boreale_,
vol. i. pp. 128 ff.), Helgi the hero is slain, and returns as a ghost to
his lady, who follows him to his grave. But her tears are bad for him:
they fall in blood on his corpse.

The subject of the Lyke-wake would easily bear a monograph to itself,
and at present I know of none. I have therefore ventured, in choosing
Aubrey's version in place of the better known one printed--and doubtless
written over--by Sir Walter Scott, to give rather fuller information
concerning the Dirge, its folklore, and its bibliography. A short study
of the ramifications of the various superstitions incorporated therein
leads to a sort of surprise that there is no popular ballad treating of
the subject of St. Patrick's Purgatory, which has attracted more than
one English poet. Thomas Wright's volume on the subject, however, is
delightful and instructive reading.

II

The short section of Ballads of Sacred Origin contains all that we
possess in England--notice that only two have Scottish variants, even
fragmentary--and somewhat more than can be classified as ballads with
strictness. Yet I would fain have added other of our 'masterless'
carols, which to-day seem to survive chiefly in the West of England.
One of their best lovers, Mr. Quiller-Couch, has complained that, after
promising himself to include a representative selection of carols in his
anthology, he was chagrined to discover that they lost their quaint
delicacy when placed among other more artificial lyrics. Perhaps they
would have been more at home set amongst these ballads; but I have
excluded them with the less regret in remembering that they stand well
alone in the collections of Sylvester, Sandys, Husk; in the reprints of
Thomas Wright; and, in more recent years, in the selections of Mr. A. H.
Bullen and Canon Beeching.

_The Maid and the Palmer_ would appear to be the only ballad of Christ's
wanderings on the earth that we possess, just as _Brown Robyn's
Confession_ is the only one of the miracles of the Virgin. One may
guess, however, that others have descended rapidly into nursery rhymes,
as in the case of one, n