o claim back a plighted word; and at
the same time we feel the strength of the perfect love that triumphs
over death and casts out fear:

'"Is there any room at your head, Willie,
Or any room at your feet,
Or any room at your side, Willie,
Wherein that I may creep?"'

How miserably the poetical taste of the early part of last century
misappreciated the spirit of the ancient ballad, preferring the dross to
the fine gold, and tricking out the 'terrific old Scottish tale,' as
Sir Walter Scott calls it, in meretricious ornament, may be seen by
comparing the original copies with that 'elegant' composition of David
Mallet, _William and Margaret_, so praised and popular in its day, in
which every change made is a disfigurement of the nature of an outrage.
Read the summons of the ghost, still 'naked of ornament and simple':

'"O sweet Marg'ret, O dear Marg'ret!
I pray thee speak to me;
Gie me my faith and troth, Marg'ret,
As I gae it to thee,"'

along with the 'improved' version:

'"Awake!" she cried, "thy true love calls,
Come from her midnight grave;
Now let thy pity hear the maid
Thy love refused to save."'

Of a long antiquity most of these Mythological Ballads must be, if not
in their actual phraseology, in the dark superstitions they embody and
in the pathetic glimpses they afford us of the thoughts and fears and
hopes of the men and women of the days of long ago--the days before
feudalism; the days, as some inquisitors of the ballad assure us, when
religion was a kind of fetichism or ancestor worship, when the laws were
the laws of the tribe or family, and when the cannibal feast may have
been among the customs of the race. We cannot find a time when this
inheritance of legend was not old; when it was not sung, and committed
to memory, and handed down to later generations in some rude rhyme. The
leading 'types' were in the wallet of Autolycus; and he describes
certain of them with a seasoning of his grotesque humour, to his simple
country audience. There were the well-attested tale of the _Usurer's
Wife_, a ballad sung, as ballads are wont, 'to a very doleful
tune'--obviously a form of the Supernatural Birth; and the story, true
as it is pitiful, of the fish that turned to woman, and then back again
to fish, in which he that runs may read an example from the Mermaid
Cycle. They are to be found to-day, often in debased and barely
recognisable guise, in