Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/20

 14 totemistic meaning. Chingachgook, the Mohican, was not a serpent by family or totemism. We were all at school with boys called Pussy, Piggy, Monkey, and so forth. Thus, on the whole, we feel driven back to the opinion that, though our folk-lore may, and probably does, hold traces of totemism, the evidence is by no means good enough to convince our opponent, except in two or three cases, and those Irish.

It would be pleasant, were it possible, to review all the fresh contributions to the year’s folk-lore. But for that purpose a man would need much leisure, and a knowledge of all European languages, including Finnish. I shall offer a few remarks on ballads. Professor Child of Harvard has put forth the sixth of his eight volumes, and we cannot too kindly congratulate America on his most valuable and really exhaustive work. On one point Mr. Child has not yet convinced me. We all know the ballad of Marie Hamilton, executed for killing her own child, by Darnley, at the Court of Mary Stuart. Now Kirkpatrick Sharpe fancied that this ballad was founded on the death of a Miss Hamilton, a maid-of-honour at the Court of Peter the Great. Mr. Child adopts this opinion, “however surprising it may be, or seem, that, as late as the eighteenth century, the popular genius, helped by nothing but a name, should have been able so to fashion and colour an episode in the history of a distant country as to make it fit very plausibly into the times of Mary Stuart.” Now it is true that none of the Queen’s Maries died for an intrigue with Darnley. But a French woman of the Queen’s chamber did suffer for child-murder, and Knox expressly states that there were ballads about “the Maries and the rest of the dancers of the court”. To me it seems more plausible that, given an actual scandal, and given ballads about the Maries, the ballads finally adapted the scandal, than that, in the eighteenth century, so many ballads were made about Miss Hamilton in Russia, and were fitted into the time of