This volume concludes the series, begun in 1903, which was intended to
comprise all the best traditional ballads of England and Scotland. The
scheme of classification by subject-matter, arbitrary and haphazard as
it may seem to be at one point or another, has, I think, proved more
satisfactory than could have been anticipated; and in the end I have
omitted no ballad without due justification.
In the fourteen years which have elapsed since the completion of
Professor Child's collection, there has been discovered, so far as I
know, only one ballad that can claim the right to be added to his roll
of 305 'English and Scottish Popular Ballads.' That one is the carol of
_The Bitter Withy_, which I was fortunate enough to recover in 1905,
which my friend Professor Gerould of Princeton University has annotated
with an erudition worthy of Child, and the genuineness of which has been
sponsored by Professor Gummere.[1] I should perhaps have included this
in its place in my Second Series, had I known of it in time, but I still
hope to treat the traditional English Carols separately. I ought to
admit here that the confidence with which I claimed, in my Third Series,
a place on the roll for _The Jolly Juggler_, has abated, and I now
consider it to be no more than a narrative lyric without any definitely
'popular' characteristics.
These four volumes contain in all 143 ballads, four of which are not to
be found in Child's collection.[2] Thus, out of his 305, I have omitted
more than half; but it must be remembered that his work was a
collection, and mine--_si parva licet componere magnis_--has been
selection. The omitted ballads are either:--
(i) Fragmentary or mutilated;
(ii) Closely related to ballads which I include;
(iii) Uninteresting, _e.g._ as dealing with obscure history;
(iv) Degenerate.
The last reason for exclusion particularly affects the Robin Hood
ballads, among which Child prints thirty-three late broadsides and
fragments which I omit. He preferred to err by inclusion rather than
exclusion, and states that he has admitted more than one ballad,
'actually worthless and manifestly spurious, because of a remote
possibility that it might contain relics, or be a debased
representative, of something genuine and better.'[3]
I cannot take leave of nine years' intermittent work on this selection
without remembering that its 'only begetter' was Mr. A. H. Bullen, with
whom I published the first three volumes. While I regret to think how
different it is in the result from the edition he then envisaged,
I gratefully acknowledge my indebtedness to him for the inoculation. The
anthologist is strictly a plucker of the flowers of literature; but the
ballads are not literature--they are lore, and therefore of warmer human
interest.