How is thy love ally'd?
My love quoth young Cordelia then
Which to your grace I owe
Shall be the duty of a child
And that is all I'll show.
This honest pledge the King despised and banished Cordelia. The ballad accords with the drama in the catastrophe. Both have the same moral and the same characters. The ballad is doubtless the earlier form of the story. Possibly the minstrel and dramatist may have borrowed from a common source. Good thoughts, good tales and noble deeds, like well-worn coins, sometimes lose their date and must be estimated by weight. Ballad poetry is written in various measures and with diverse feet. The rhythm is easy and flows along trippingly from the tongue with such regular emphasis and cadence as to lead instinctively to a sort of sing-song in the recital of it. Ballads are more frequently written in common metre lines of eight and six syllables alternating. Such is the famous ballad of "Chevy Chace,"[5] which has been growing in popular esteem for more than three hundred years. Ben Jonson used to say he would rather have been the author of it than of all his works. Sir Philip Sidney, in his discourse on poetry, says of it: "I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglass that I found not my heart more moved than with a trumpet." Addison wrote an elaborate review of it in the seventieth and seventy-fourth numbers of the Spectator. He there demonstrates that this old ballad has all the elements in it of the loftiest existing epic. The moral is the same as that of the Iliad:
"God save the king and bless the land
In plenty, joy and peace
And grant henceforth that foul debate
Twixt noblemen may cease."