Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/454

 OBITUARY.

PROFESSOR CHILD.

great American authority on popular ballads, he who did even more for ballads than Köhler for Märchen, died on September 11. Professor Child was born at Cambridge (Massachusetts) in 1825, went to Harvard in 1846, commenced as tutor there, studied later in Germany, and, in 1851, became Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. In 1876 he took the Chair of English Literature, lecturing in Old English, Chaucer, and Shakespeare.

In 1861 Mr. Child published eight volumes of English ballads, omitting The Bonny Hynd, The Baffled Knight, The Jolly Beggar, The Keach in the Creel, and The Earl of Errol. Scott had published the first of these, Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe had printed the last. Probably American modesty stood in Mr. Child's way. Of variants, only "the more important" were given. They were arranged in accordance with "the probable antiquity of the story', not the age of the actual form or language," which has necessarily been modernised in oral recitation. "The most authentic copies" of the texts were selected; but Mr. Child had not then access to many manuscript collections. References to parallel ballads and stories in other than Teutonic languages were comparatively meagre.

In 1882 (so the dedication to Mr. Furnivall is dated) Mr. Child began to publish his new and, as far as possible, exhaustive edition of ballads (Houghton, Mifflin, and Co., Boston). He had been engaged for ten years in stimulating collectors in Scotland, Canada, and the United States. He had obtained the use of MSS., such as Motherwell's, Kinloch's, Jamieson's transcript of Mrs. Brown's, Islay's, and the MSS. at Abbotsford. Looking over those, one day, I was beset by an importunate temptation to "fake" a ballad or two, have them copied in bad ink on old paper, and thrust them into the mass for the purpose of deceiving Mr. Child. The temptation was resisted. It is superfluous to praise the method, industry, and learning of the great new