(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.
F. S.
[1.] The Popular Ballad (1907), p. 228.
[2.] These are The Nutbrown Maid, First Series; The Lyke-Wake Dirge and Adam, Second Series; and The Jolly Juggler, Third Series.
[3.] Vol. v. p. 182.