The Mystery of "The Queen's Marie"- Andrew Lang; Blackwood's Magazine, Volume 158; Sept. 1895
[Footnotes moved to the end of this article.]
THE MYSTERY OF "THE QUEEN'S MARIE" by Andrew Lang
Mr Courthrope's new 'History of English Poetry' (Macmillan) revives a theory that the touching ballad of "Mary Hamilton," or "The Queen's Marie," is not older than the year 1719. This hypothesis, supported by the unrivalled authority of Professor Child of Harvard, has now for at least eighty-five years been before the world, yet it comes as a startling novelty to sonic reviewers. To Mr Courthope the opinion is not unwelcome, as it harmonises with his general doctrine of the popular ballad and its debt to literary poetry and romance. On this theme one would fain break a lance with Mr Courthope, but it may be less tedious to examine the facts about "The Queen's Marie," and to show cause for the belief that it is not of 1719, but a popular poem of Queen Mary's time. Historically correct it is not; at most it is a popular perversion of facts which occurred at the Court of Queen Mary.
The subject of this ballad, which we still occasionally hear sung to a crooning old melody, is familiar to every one. In a crowd of various versions, where names, details, and phrases all differ wildly, we discern that a maid-of-honour (often, but not always, styled "Mary Hamilton ") was hanged for the murder of her illegitimate child at the Court of Mary Stuart. No maid-of-honour, in point of fact, suffered thus in Mary's reign. What, then, is the origin of the ballad -what is its history? The first known literary reference to the poem is made by Burns in a letter to Mrs Dunlop (January 25, 1790). Burns is speaking of the wanderings of the Scots: "I remember a stanza tn an old Scottish ballad, which, notwithstanding its rude simplicity, speaks feelingly to the heart:—
'Little did my mother think,
That day she cradled me,
What land I was to travel in,
Or what death I should die.'"
This is the exclamation of Mary Hamilton, in the ballad, as she waits for death. In 1802 Scott published three stanzas of the ballad in his 'Border Minstrelsy' (ii. 154). He remarked that the whole piece might probably be recovered. In his fourth impression (of 1810, vol. iii. p. 87) he made up "a complete edition by copies from various quarters," especially using a text furnished by Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe. Sharpe put forth his own copy in a 'Ballad-Book' of 1823, reprinted, with additions, in 1880. Several oral versions were also collected by Motherwell, Buchan, Skene of Rubislaw, Kinloch, Finlay, and others. We may add (what is apparently unknown to Mr Child) that an obscene and unquotable form, of part at least, of the ballad exists in English tradition.
"The subject of the ballad," Scott says, "seems to be" (Scott does not commit himself) "a scandal "—piously conserved by John Knox.[1] At the time of the General Assembly which met on Christmas Day 1563, a French waiting-maid of Mary Stuart's, "ane Frenche woman that servit in the Queenis chalmer," fell into sin "with the Queenis awin hipoticary." The father and mother slew the child, and were " dampned to be hangit upoun the publict streit of Edinburgh." No official report exists: "the records of the Court of Justiciary at this time are defective," says Maidment, and he conjectures that the accused may have been hanged without trial, "red-hand." Now the Queen's apothecary must have left traces in the Royal account-books. No writer on the subject has mentioned them. I myself have had the Records of Privy Council and the MS. Treasurer's Accounts examined, with their statement of the expenses of the Royal household. The Rev. John Anderson was kind enough to undertake this task, though with less leisure than he could have desired. There is, unluckily, a gap of some months in 1563. In June 1500, Mr. Anderson finds mention of a "medicinar," "la poticarre," "apotigar," but no name is given, and the Queen was then in France. One Nicholas Wardlaw of the Royal household was engaged, in 1562, to a Miss Seton of Parbroath, but it needed a special Royal messenger to bring the swain to the altar. "Ane appotigar"of 1562 is mentioned, but not named, and we hear of Robert Henderson, chirurgeon, "who supplied" powders and odours to embalm Huntley. There is no trace of the hanging of any "appotigar," or of any one of the Queen's women, "the maidans," spoken of collectively. So far, the search for the apothecary has been a failure. More can be learned from Randolph's letter to Cecil (Dec. 31, 1563) here copied from the MS. in the Public Record Office. The austerity of Mary's Court, under Mr Knox, is amusingly revealed:—
"For newes yt maye please your honour to knowe that the Lord Treasurer of Scotlande for gettinge of a woman with chylde muste vpon Sondaye nexte do open penance before the whole congregation and mr knox inayke the sermonde. Thys my Lord of murraye wylled me to wryte vuto you for a note of our gveate severitie in punyshynge of offenders. The frenche potticarie and the woman he ffotte with chylde were bothe hanged this present Fridaye. Thys hathe made ruyche sorrowe in our Courte. Maynie evle fortunes we have had by our Freuche fowlkes, and yet I feare we love them over well."
After recording the condemnation of the waiting-woman and her lover, Knox tells a false story about "shame hastening the marriage" of Mary Livingstone. Dr Robertson, in his 'Inventories of Queen Mary,' refutes this slander, which he deems as baseless as the fables against Knox's own continence. Knox adds, "What bruit the Maries and the rest of the danseris of the Oourte had, the ballads of that age did witness, quhilk we for modesteis sake omit." Unlucky omission, unfortunate "modestei "! From Randolph's Letters it is known that Knox, at this date, was thundering against "danseris." Here, then, is a tale of the Queen's French waiting-woman hanged for murder, and here is proof that there actually were ballads about the Queen's Maries. These ladies, as we know from Keith, were, at first, in the Queen's childhood, Mary Livingstone, Mary Seatoun, Mary Eeatoun, and Mary Fleming. The ballad usually names "Mary Beatoun, Mary Seatoun, and Mary Carmichael, and me,"—the heroine, who is usually called Mary Hamilton, but who bears many other names in variants, as we shall show. Mr Conrthope rightly says there was no Mary Hamilton, "any more than Mary Carmichael." Maidment does, indeed, give us the genealogy of a Mary Carmichael, then about the Court, and records her marriage to Sir Robert Preston. Her brother was Warden of the West Marches, and was killed at a football-match on a Sunday. But Maidment does not prove Mary Carmichael to have been a "Queen's Marie." Her name does not occur among the persons to whom the Queen made bequests in June 1556. They were the original Maries—Beatoun, Seatoun, Livingstone, and Fleming—three of whom are correctly named in one variant of the ballad. No Mary Hamilton is mentioned in the Queen's will, and, so far, the ballad seems to be as incorrect, historically, as ballads invariably are.
We have, then, a child-murder, by a woman of the Queen's, we have ballads about her Maries, and, as Scott says, "the tale has suffered great alterations, as handed down by tradition, the French waitingwoman being changed into Mary Hamilton, and the Queen's apothecary into Henry Darnley," who, as Mr Child shows, was not even in Scotland in 1563. But gross perversion of contemporary facts does not prove a ballad to be late or apocryphal. Mr Child even says that accuracy in a ballad would be very " suspicious." Thus, for example, wo know, from contemporary evidence, that the murder of the Bonny Earl Murray, in 1592 by Huntley, was at once made the topic of ballads. Of these, Aytoun and Mr Child print two widely different in details: in the first, Huntley has married Murray's sister; in the second, Murray is the lover of the Queen of James
VI. Both statements are picturesque; but the former is certainly, and the latter is probably, untrue. Again, "King James and Brown," in the Percy MS., is accepted as a genuine contemporary ballad of the youth of gentle King Jamie. James is herein made to say to his nobles,—
"My grandfather you have slaine,
And my own mother you hanged on a tree."
Even if we read "father" (against the manuscript) this is absurd. James V. was not "slaine," neither Darnley nor Mary was "hanged on a tree." Ballads are always inaccurate; they do not report events, so much as throw into verse the popular impression of events, the magnified, distorted, dramatic rumours. That a ballad-writer should promote a Queen's tirewoman into a Queen's Marie, and substitute Darnley (where he is the lover, which is not always) for the Queen's apothecary, is a licence quite in keeping with precedent. Mr Child, obviously, would admit this. In producing a Marie who never existed, the "maker " shows the same delicacy as Voltaire, when he brings into 'Candide' a Pope who never was born.
Thus our ballad might have passed unchallenged as old, but (in 1810) Scott added to his fourth edition, from C. K. Sharpe, a note of "a very odd coincidence in name, crime, and catastrophe which occurred at the Court of Czar Peter the Great." A Miss Hambleton, maid of honour to the Czarina, was tried, tortured, and, of course, found guilty of childmurder. Peter, at her decapitation, picked up her head by the ear and kissed it! Mr Sharpe himself possessed a print, from a German almanac, illustrating this incident. He says, in a manuscript noto, "the Russian traijfdy must be the oriyinal." "This opinion is the only tenable one," says Mr Child. Mr Courthope follows him, and the 'Spectator' (July 20, 1895) is under serious conviction. Mr Child allows that the published accounts of the Russian "Mary [?] Hamilton" "differ to much the same degree as some versions of the Scottish ballad "—that is, they differ toto caelo. From a Russian work of 1885, based "on original and authentic documents," Mr Child shows that the Hamiltons had been settled for an unknown period in Russia, that one of them married a minister of Peter the Great, and that the condemned woman was (probably) niece of that minister's son. "Mary " was twice tortured, was condemned on November 27, 1718, and was executed in presence of the Czar, on March 14, 1719. We may add that, as Wogan and Ormonde were on King James's business in Russia in 1718, the facts might reach Scotland through Jacobite channels.
Mr Courthope justly remarks that these facts were "excellently adapted for the ballad-maker's use." One "maker," he thinks, "conceived the happy idea of throwing back the incidents of the actual Russian" tragedy into the reign of Mary Queen of Scots, and turning the real Mary Hamilton into one of the Queen's Maries. "A later maker" produced "a greatly improved version, copied" (from what source?) "by a granddaughter of Lord Woodhouselee" (1840). Mr Child thinks that "the popular genius" did the trick, "helped by nothing but a name,"—that of Hamilton. He admits that "it is very remarkable that one of the very latest of the Scottish popular ballads should be one of the very best."
It is very remarkable indeed! What, we may ask, does Mr Courthope mean by a "maker"? He cannot mean a man of letters. In 1719 no known man of letters had either the skill or the desire to forge a ballad on the ancient model, not yet brought back into fashion by Percy, though dear to Addison and Mr Pepys. When Shenstone, Meikle, or Mallett, wrote ballads, when Allan Ramsay laid his profane hands on an old ballad, they produced things glaringly artificial. Mr Courthope must probably mean a popular poet. Now what were popular poets demonstrably doing under the first two Georges? They were very busy, indeed, but not with archaic ballads. They had ceased, as far as we know, to write even such decadent ballads, in the old style, as those on Philiphaugh and Bothwell Bridge and Loudon Hill (Drumclog). By 1689 Killiecrankie is sung in a very different manner. So is Sheriffmuir in 1715; and, even if "Derwent's Lament" be genuine (it comes through the roguish Surtees), it is not mistakabln in style for a genuine old ballad. In 1719-1745 the popular poets were sarcastic (as in the "Sheriffmuir" and "Gledsmuir" ballads), or loyally lyric, as in the genuine Jacobite songs, or they dealt in pure doggerel (like the Glasgow Bellman in his rhymed history of "The Forty-Five"), or they were utterly of the gutter.
These, at least, were the varieties of truly popular poetry, as far as my own acquaintance with it goes. Chambers published a ballad of "Rob Roy"—that is, of Robin Oig and James More, son of Rob Roy, and about their abduction of an heiress in 1752. This is a genuine popular poem, but in style and tone and versification it is wholly unlike "The Queen's Marie." The burden of proof that ballads in that old manner were still written as late as 1719 lies on Mr Child, and if he cannot provide examples, the rest of us balladists may despair. I scarcely hope that even Mr Child, the master of all who "love a ballad but even too well," can produce, after 1680, a single popular piece which could be mistaken for a ballad of Queen Mary's time.
The known person least unlike Mr Courthope's "maker" was "Mussel-mou'd Charlie Leslie," "an old Aberdeenshire minstrel, the very last, probably, of the race," says Scott. Charlie died in 1782. He sing, and sold printed ballads. "Why cannot you sing other songs than those rebellious ones?" asked a Hanoverian Provost of Aberdeen. "Oh ay, but —they winna buy them!" said Charlie. "Where do you buy them?" "Why, faur I get them cheapest." He carried his ballads in "a large harden bag, hung over his shoulder." Charlie had tholed prison for Prince Charles, and had seen Provost Morison drink the Prince's health in wine and proclaim him Regent at the Cross of Aberdeen. If Charlie (who lived to be a hundred and two) composed the song "Mussel-mou'd Charlie " (" this sang Charlie made hissel'"), then this maker could never have produced "The Queen's Marie," nor could any maker like him. His ballads were printed, as any successful ballad of 1719 would probably have been, in broadsides.[2] Against Mr Child and Mr Courthope, then, we argue that, after 1600, a marked decadence of the old ballad style set in,—that the old style (as far as is known) died soon after Bothwell Brig (1679), in the execrable ballads of both sides, and that it was not only dead as a form in practical use, but was entirely superseded by new kinds of popular poetry, of which many examples survive, and are familiar to every student. How, or why, then, should a poet, aiming at popularity, compose "The Queen's Marie" in an obsolete manner? The old ballads were still sung, indeed, but we ask for proof that new ballads were still composed in the ancient fashion.
Secondly, why, and how tempted, would a popular poet of 1719 transfer a modern tragedy of Russia to the year 1563, or thereabouts! His public would naturally desire a ballad gazette of the mournful new tale, concerning a lass of Scottish extraction betrayed, tortured, beheaded, at the far-off court of a Muscovite tyrant. The facts "palpitated with actuality," and, since Homer's day, "men desire" (as Homer says) "the new songs " on the new events. What was gained by going back to Queen Mary? Would a popular "Mussel-mou'd Charlie" even know the names of the Queen's Maries, now familiar to all, and immortal in the ballad? Mr Courthope admits that "he may have been helped by some ballad," one of those spoken of by Knox. If that ballad told the existing Marian story, what did the "maker" add? If it did not, what did he borrow? No more than the names could he borrow, and no more than the name "Mary Hamilton" from the Russian tragedy, could he add. One other thing he might be said to add, the verses in which Mary asks "the jolly sailors " not to
"Let on to my father and mother
But that I'm coming hame."
This passage, according to Mr Courthope, "was suggested partly by the fact of a Scotswoman being executed in Russia." C. K. Sharpe also says, "If Marie Hamilton was executed in Scotland, it is not likely" (why not?) "that her relations resided beyond seas." They may have been in France, like many another Hamilton! Mr Child says, "The appeal to the sailors shows that Mary Hamilton dies in a foreign land— not that of her ancestors." Yet the ballad makes her die in or near the Canongate! Moreover, the family of the Mary Hamilton of 1719 had been settled in Russia for generations, and were reckoned of the Russian noblesse. Sailors no more carry news across Russia than across Scotland; the verses, therefore, on either theory, are out of place, and are probably an interpolation suggested to some reciter (they only occur in some of the many versions) by a passage in "The Twa Brithers." Thirdly, we reach the most important argument for the antiquity of "The Queen's Marie." Mr Courthope has introduced as existing in, or after, 1719, two "makers " who could imitate to deception the old ballad style. Now Maidment remarks that "this ballad was popular in Galloway, Selkirkshire, Lanarkshire, and Aberdeen, and tht very striking discrepancies go far to remove every suspicion of fabrication." Chambers uses (1829) against Sharpe the same argument of "universal diffusion in Scotland." Neither Mr Child nor Mr Courthope draws the obvious inferences from the extraordinary discrepancies in the eighteen variants. Such essential discrepancies surely speak of a long period of oral recitation by men or women accustomed to interpolate, alter, and add, in the true old ballad manner. Did such rhapsodists exist after 1719? and if the ballad (as it probably would be in 1719) was printed, or even if it was not, could the variations have been evolved between 1719 and 1802?
These variations are numerous, striking, and fundamental. In many variants even the name of the heroine does not tally with that of the Russian maid of honour. That most important and telling coincidence wholly disappears. In a version of Motherwell's, from Dumbartonshire, the heroine is Mary Myle. In a version known to Scott (Minstrelsy, 1810, iii. 89, note), the name is Mury Miles. Mr Child also finds Mary Mild, Mary Moil, and Lady Maisry. This Maisry is daughter of the Duke of York! Now the Duke of York whom alone the Scottish people knew was James Stuart, later Tames II. Once more the heroine is daughter of the Duke of Argyll, therefore a Campbell. Or she is without patronymic, and is daughter of a lord or knight of the North, or South, or East, and one of her sisters is a barber's wife, and her father lives in England !— (Motherwell.) She, at least, might invoke "Ye mariners, mariners, mariners!" (as in Scott's first fragment) not to carry her story. Now we ask Mr. Courthope and Mr. Child whether they believe that, after the ringing tragedy of Miss Hamilton in Russia, in the year of grace 1719, contemporaries who heard the woful tale could, between 1719 and 1802, call the heroine— (1) Hamilton; (2) Mild, Moil, Myle, Miles; (3) make her a daughter of the Duke of York, or of the Duke of Argyll, or of lords and of knights from all quarters of the compass, and sister-in-law to an English barber, also one of the Queen's "serving-maids," like the Knoxian "Frenche woman that servit in the Queenis chalmer"? We at least cannot accept those numerous and glittering contradictions as corruptions which could be made soon after the Russian events, when the true old ballad style was dead.
We now produce more startling variations. The lover is not only "the King," "the Prince," Darnley, "the highest Stuart o' a'," but he is also that old offender, "Sweet Willie," or he is Warrenston (Warriston?). Mary is certainly not hanged (the Russian woman was beheaded) away from her home; she dies in Edinburgh, near the Tolbooth, the Netherbow, the Canongate, and—
"O what will my three brothers say
When they come hame frae sea,
When they see three locks o' my yellow hair
Hinging under a gallows tree?"
It is impossible here to give all the variations. Mary pulls, or does not pull, or her lover pulls, the leaf of the Abbey, or "savin," or other tree; the Queen is "auld," or not "auld"; she kicks in Mary's door and bursts the bolts, or does nothing so athletic, and inconsistent with heradvanced age. The heroine does, or does not, appeal vainly to her father. Her dress is of all varieties. She does, or does not, go to the Tolbooth and other places. She is, or is not, allured to Edinburgh, "a wedding for to see." Her infanticide is variously described, or its details are omitted, and the dead body of the child is found in various places, or not found at all. Though drowned in the sea, it is between the bolster and the wall, or under the blankets! She expects, or does not expect, to be avenged by her kin. The king is now angry, now clement—inviting Mary to dinner! Mary is hanged, or (Buchan's MS.) is not hanged, but is ransomed by Warrenston, probably Johnston of Warriston! These are a few specimens of variations in point of fact: in language the variations are practically countless.
W^ now condescend to appeal to statistics. We have examined the number of variants published by Mr Child in his first six volumes, on ballads which have, or may have, an historical basis. Of course, the older and more popular the ballads, the more variants do we expect to discover—time and taste producing frequent changes. Well, of " Otterburn" Mr Child has five versions; of the "Hunting of the Cheviot" he has two, with minor modifications indicated by letters from the "lower case." Of "Gude Wallace" he has eight. Of "Johnnie Armstrong" he has three. Of "Kinmont Willie" he has one. Of "The Bonnie Earl o' Moray " he has two. Of "Johnnie Cock" he has thirteen. Of "Sir Patrick Spens" he has eighteen. And of "The Queen's Marie" (counting Burns's solitary verse and other brief fragments) Mr Child has eighteen versions or variants!
Thus a ballad made, ex hypothesi Sharpiana, in or after 1719, has been as much altered in oral tradition as the most popular and perhaps the most antique ballad of all, "Sir Patrick Spens," and much more than any other of the confessedly ancient semi-historical popular poems. The historical event which may have suggested "Sir Patrick Spens" is "plausibly," says Mr Child, fixed in 1281: it is the marriage of Margaret of Scotland to Eric, King of Norway. No wonder, then, that in so long a time an orally preserved ballad is rich in variants. But that a ballad of 1719 should, in eighty modern non-balladizing years, become as rich in extant variants, and far more discrepant in their details, than "Sir Patrick Spens" in five centuries, is a circumstance for which we invite Mr Child and Mr Courthope to account. Will they say, "The later the ballad, the more it is altered in oral tradition'"! If so, let them, by all means, produce examples! We should, on this theory, have about a dozen "Battles of Philiphaugh," and at least fifteen "Bothwell Brigs," a poem, by the way, much in the old manner, prosaically applied, and so recent that, in part at least, it was produced after the death of the Duke of Monmouth, slain, it avers, by the machinations of Claverhouse! Of course we are not asking for exact proportions, since many variants of ballads may be lost, but merely for proof that, the later a ballad is, the more variants of it occur. But this contention is probably impossible, and the numerous variations in "The Queen's Marie," as in "Sir Patrick Spens," are really a proof of long existence in oral tradition, and contradict the theory espoused by Mr Child.
This argument, though statistical, is, we think, conclusive, and the other considerations which we have produced in favour of the antiquity of "The Queen's Marie" add their cumulative weight. We have been, in brief, invited to suppose that, about 1719, a Scot wrote a ballad on an event in contemporary Russian Court life; that (contrary to use and wont) he threw the story back a century and a half; that he was a master of an old style, in the practice of his age utterly obsolete and unimitated; that his poem became universally popular, and underwent, in seventy years, even more vicissitudes than most other ballads encounter in three or perhaps even five centuries. Meanwhile it is certain that there had been real ancient ballads, contemporary with the Marian events, —ballads on the very Maries who appear in the so-called poem of 1719; while exactly the same sort of scandal as the ballad records had actually occurred at Queen. Mary's Court in a lower social rank. The theory of Mr Child is opposed to our whole knowledge of ballad literature, of its age, decadence (about 1620-1700), and decease (in the old kind) as a popular art. To agree with Mr Child, we must not only accept one great ballad - poet, born at least seventy years too late; we must not only admit that such a poet would throw back his facts for a century and a half; but we must also conceive that the balladising humour, with its ancient methods, was even more vivacious in Scotland for many years after 1719 than, as far as we know, it had ever been before. Yet there is no other trace known to us of the existence of the old balladising humour and of the old art in all that period. We have no such ballad about the English captain shot by the writer's pretty wife, none about the bewitched son of Lord Torphichen, none about the Old Chevalier, or Lochiel, or Prince Charlie: we have merely Shenstone's "Jemmy Dawson"! and the Glasgow bellman's rhymed history of Prince Charles. In fact, "Jemmy Dawson" is a fair inslantia conlradictoria as far as a ballad by a man of letters is to the point. Such a ballad that age could indeed produce: it is not very like "The Queen's Marie"! Mr Child cannot take refuge in "Townley's Ghost" and his address to the Butcher Cumberland :—
"Imbrued in bliss, imbathed in ease,
Though now them seem'st to lie,
My injured form shall gall thy peace,
And make thee wish to die!"
is a ballad of the eighteenth century, and it is not much in the manner of "The Queen's Marie." These considerations, now so obvious to a student of the art of old popular poetry, if he thinks of the matter, could not occur to Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe. He was a great collector of ballads, but not versed in, or interested in, their "Esthetic" — in the history and evolution of balladmaking. Mr Child, on the other hand, is the Grimm or Kohler of popular English and Scottish poetry. Our objections to his theory could scarcely have been collected in such numbers, without the aid of his own assortment of eighteen versions or fragments, with more lectiones varitv. But he has not allowed for the possible, the constantly occurring, chance of coincidence between fancy and fact; nor, perhaps, has he reflected on the changed condition of ballad poetry in the eighteenth century, on the popular love of a new song about a new event, and on the entire lack of evidence (as far as I am aware) for the existence of ballad - poets in the old manner during the reign of George I. The ballad-reading public of 1719 would have revelled in a fresh ballad of a Scottish lass, recently betrayed, tortured, and slain far away by a Russian tyrant. A fresh ballad on Queen Mary's Court, done in the early obsolete manner, would, on the other hand, have had comparatively little charm for the ballad-buying lieges in 1719. The ballad-poet had thus in 1719 no temptation to be "archaistic," like Mr Rossetti, and to sing of old times. He had, on the contrary, every inducement to indite "a rare new ballad" on the last tragic scandal, with its poignant details, as of Peter kissing the dead girl's head.
The hypothesis of Mr Child could only be demonstrated incorrect by proving that there was no Russian scandal at all, or by producing a printed or manuscript copy of "The Queen's Marie" older than 1719. We can do neither of these things; we can only give the reader his choice of two improbabilities—(a) that an historical event, in 1718-19, chanced to coincide with the topic of an old ballad; (b) that, contrary to all we know of the evolution of ballads and the state of taste, a new popular poem on a fresh theme was composed in a style long disused, [3] was offered most successfully to the public of 1719, and in not much more than half a century was more subjected to alterations and interpolations than ballads which for two or three hundred years had run the gantlet of oral tradition.
As for our own explanation of the resemblance between the affair of Miss Hamilton, in 1719, and the ballad story of Mary Hamilton (alias Mild, Myle, Moil, Campbell, Miles, or Stuart, or anonymous, or Lady Maisry), we simply, with Scott, regard it as "a very curious coincidence." On the other theory, on Mr Child's, it is also a curious coincidence that a waitingwoman of Mary Stuart's was hanged (not beheaded) for childmurder, and that there were written, simultaneously, ballads on the Queen's Maries. Much odder coincidences than either have often, and indisputably, occurred, and it is not for want of instances, but for lack of space, that we do not give examples.
This contention is not to be regarded as other than audacious. To differ from Sharpe and Mr Child about a question of balladlore savours of impiety. But Chambers and Motherwell are of our party, and Scott did not pronounce for either side. The Sharpeian hypothesis is useful, but not essential, to Mr Courthope's general theory of ballads, which runs counter to that adopted, as regards Miirchen, popular poetry, myths, riddles, and proverbs, by the majority of volk-lorists. That there is an element of truth in Mr Courthope's belief, one readily admits; but did space permit, it could be shown not to be the whole truth of the matter.
Footnotes:
1 Knox in Laing, ii. 415.
2. See, for example, Mr Macquoid's 'Jacobite Songs and Ballads,' pp. 424, 510, with a picture of Charlie.
3. A learned (Scots antiquary writes to us: "The real ballad manner hardly carne down to 1600. It was killed by the Francis Roos version of the Psalms, after which the Scottish folk of the Lowlands cast everything into that mould." We think, however, that "Bothwell Brig" is a true survival of the ancient style.
A. Lang.