We have said that the English ballads, as a whole, are decidedly inferior to the Scottish. They are neither, in their individual kinds, so stirring, so earnest, so plaintive, nor so imaginative, and Chevy Chase is a tame concern when weighed against the Battle of Otterbourne. But many of them are of great merit, and amongst the very best are those which relate to Robin Hood, and the three stout bowmen of the North, Adam Bell, Clym of the Clough, and William of Cloudeslee. Robin has a fair right to be considered the yeoman hero of England, and the representative of what must have been a tolerably large class of persons throughout the wars of the Roses. In his history, we can trace a kind of tacit protest against absolute despotism and feudal oppression. He is the daring freeman of the soil, who will not live under arbitrary law, and who, in consequence, ends by setting all laws whatever at defiance. He is not a thief, but a free-booter, and is entitled to receive from posterity whatever credit may be attachable to such a character. His is, in many respects, a parallel case to that of Rob Roy Macgregor, though there is far more of deep tragedy as well as of patriotism, interwoven with the history of the Highland outlaw. Robin asserts no tangible principles beyond active opposition to the church, and determined hostility to the game-laws. For the first of these tenets Baines would have fallen down and worshipped him: for the second, John Bright would have clothed his whole company gratuitously in drab. He is fond of fighting, and ready to take up the cudgels with any chance customer; but, somehow or other, he has invariably the worst of the encounter. Tinker, beggar-man, tanner, shepherd, and curtail friar, in succession, bring him to his knees, and his life would have been many times a forfeit, but for the timely assistance of his horn, which brought Little John and the rest to the rescue. Guy of Gisborne was, we believe, the only champion whom he slew unaided, and even in that meeting he was placed in sore jeopardy.
"Robin was reachless on a root,
And stumbled at that tide,
And Guy was quick and nimble withall,
And hit him upon the side.
Oh dear Ladye! said Robin Hood,
That art both mother and may,
I think it was never man's destiny
To dye before his day.
Robin thought on our Ladye dear,
And soon leapt up againe,
And straight he came with a backward stroke
And he Sir Guy hath slaine."
But there is a fine jovial rollocking spirit about the outlawed hero of Sherwood, which endears Robin to the popular heart of England: and we firmly believe that Shakspeare, when he went out poaching of a moonlight night, was more actuated by poetical precept and impulse than by any sensual covetise for the venison of old Sir Thomas Lucy.
Many ingenious persons—nay many excellent poets, have in modern times attempted to imitate the ancient Scottish ballad, but in no single case has there been a perfect fac-simile produced. The reason of the failure is obvious. An ingenious person, who is not a poet, could not for the dear life of him construct a ditty which, in order to resemble its original, must embody a strain of music, and a burst of heroic or of plaintive passion. It is not, however, by any means so difficult to imitate the diction: of which we have a notable example in the ballad of "Childe Ether," which is included in several of the collections. "Childe Alcohol," perhaps, would have been the better name, if all the circumstances which we have heard relating to its composition be true; nevertheless it is undeniable that our facetious friends who are chargeable with this literary sin, have succeeded in producing a very passable imitation, and that their phraseology at least is faultless. A poet, again, neither can nor ought to imitate, and when he is writing in earnest the attempt is absolutely hopeless. For every poet has his own style, and his own unmistakeable manner of thought and of expression, which he cannot cast off at will. If he imitates, he ceases for the time to be a poet, degenerates into a rhymster, and his flowers upon close inspection will be found to have been fabricated from muslin.
Very blind indeed must be the man who could mistake "Sir James the Rose" for an ancient Scottish ballad. Michael Bruce, the author, was more than an ingenious person: he was also a poet, and had he lived a little longer, and at a period when simplicity in composition was rated at its true value, he would in all probability have executed something better. But he wanted power, and that pathos which is indispensable for the composition of a perfect ballad. Even Scott, when he attempted too close an imitation, failed. The glorious fragment which we have already quoted, "The Eve of Saint John," "Lochinvar," and others, are not to be considered in the light of imitations, but as pure outbursts of his own high chivalrous and romantic imagination. But the third part of "Thomas the Rhymer" is an adaptation to, or continuation of the ancient fragment, with which, however, in no respect can it possibly compare. Indeed the old ballad stands almost isolated in poetry, for its wild imaginative strain.
"She's mounted on her milk-white steed,
She's ta'en true Thomas up behind;
And aye, whene'er her bridle rung,
The steed flew swifter than the wind.
O they rade on, and further on;
The steed gaed swifter than the wind,
Until they reached a desart wide,
And every land was left behind.
"Light down, light down, now, true Thomas,
And lean your head upon my knee,
Abide and rest a little space,
And I will show you ferlies three.