Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/395

Rh course of true love, of cruel parents, faithless swains, and early deaths. They relate histories of highwaymen, pirates, press-gangs, voyages, shipwrecks, murders, and executions; they celebrate feats of poaching, cock-fighting, horse-racing, and fox-hunting. On the whole, they smack strongly of the eighteenth century. Several of them refer to the Napoleonic Wars; one, to the American War of Independence; another, to the death of General Wolfe. The battles are related in a dolorous style, suited perhaps to the "broken soldier, kindly bade to stay." The soldier sometimes occurs as a lover, usually a bold one; the sailor, however, is the favourite hero of the love-stories, which turn generally on his constancy or the reverse. The apprentice is another leading personage, generally represented as lovesick, ill-used, and unfortunate. The farmer, the plough-boy, and the labouring man bulk largely among the dramatis personae; the shepherd rarely occurs, but his calling is celebrated in "Tarry Woo (ii. 215), a real "trade song" heard at sheep-shearing in Westmoreland and North Yorkshire. We do not find, in England, any songs in praise of some special locality, as we do in Ireland. The English folk-poet seems always to require a human interest. But there is usually a background of Nature in the more sentimental songs; the sunrise, the green meadows, the singing birds, the springing flowers, or else the stormy winds and "silvery tide," form the setting of the story.

From our point of view, perhaps the most interesting "find" is the carol, current in Herefordshire and elsewhere, founded on a story in the Apocryphal Gospel of St. Matthew, in which Christ curses the willow because His mother has chastised Him with it. Our member, Mrs. Leather, finds the belief widely prevalent in Herefordshire that a child or animal beaten with a willow-rod will cease to grow. This is said of broom in Shropshire, but there also a carter has been known to object to drive a horse with a "withy-stick" (mountain-ash is the proper wood for the purpose); and the willow is reputed to be (in the words of the ballad-curse) "the very first tree To perish at the heart."

Miss Broadwood, commenting on plant-burdens of ballads, "Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme," etc. (vol. iii. p. 14), makes the ingenious suggestion that they are survivals of incantations or