"In word and Will I am a friend to you,
And one friend Old is worth a hundred new."
BLOWEN.
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: