Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/333

 Collectanea.

O'^O

the variants of a ballad, it is not impossible to imagine a case in which only those versions survive in which the displacement of the earlier hero has taken place. Therefore to consider a ballad's origin or date from evidence such as that to which I have referred, is not always conclusive ; for it is the action or plot that gives to the ballad its place in a comparative setting, and not merely the accidental circumstances of place or person which, whether through literary influence or through a process of localisation, it may possess.

Joseph J. MacSweeney.

Bailey, Howth, Co. Dublin.