_Ballad of Chevy Chase: Ovid._--Addison, in his critique on the ballad
of "Chevy Chase," after quoting the stanza--
"Against Sir Hugh Montgomery,
So right his shaft he set,
The grey goose wing that was thereon
In his heart's blood was wet,"
says that "the thought" in that stanza "was never touched by any other
poet, and is such a one as would have shined in Homer or Virgil." It is
perhaps true that there is no passage in any other writer exactly
resembling this, but it is not quite true that the thought has not been
_touched_; for there is something approaching to it in Ovid's
_Metamorphoses_, where the slaughter of Niobe's children by the arrows
of Apollo is described:
"Altera per jugulum _pennis tenus_ acta sagitta est:
_Expulit hanc sanguis_; seque ejaculatus in altum
Emicat."--VI. 260.
The author of this ballad would appear, from the passages cited by
Addison, to have been well read in the Latin poets. Had Addison
recollected the above passage of Ovid, he would doubtless have adduced
it.