Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/205

 Rh Scotland, only five are without interspersed verses. Of the forty tales contained in my volume, thirteen contain rhymed lines, while four contain "survivals" of rhymes, and two others are rhythmical if not rhyming. As most of the remainder are drolls, which have probably a different origin, there seems to be great probability that originally all folk-tales of a serious character were interspersed with rhyme, and took therefore the form of the cante-fable. It is indeed unlikely that the ballad itself began as continuous verse, and the cante-fable is probably the protoplasm out of which both ballad and folk-tale have been differentiated, the ballad by omitting the narrative prose, the folk-tale by expanding it. In "Childe Rowland" we have the nearest example to such protoplasm, and it is not difficult to see how it could have been shortened into a ballad or reduced to a prose folk-tale pure and simple.

Thus a consideration of its form confirms our impression of the antiquity of our story even in its present form, and combines with our folk-lore discussion of the archaic elements of the tale to prove that in "Childe Rowland" we have the oldest of extant English fairy tales. That it is connected with such names as Shakespeare, Milton and Browning enables me to contend as I did at the beginning of this paper that "Childe Rowland" is the most interesting of our native fairy tales.