Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/71

 Rh in the Highlands of Scotland, which are still homes of living traditions. I can only conjecture that diversion of the national literary class, in consequence of the English wars and English conquest, from its proper task of fostering the traditional romance is the main cause of this strange phenomenon.

If the folk-literature of the Celtic-speaking area seems to afford scant warrant for the theory of racial as distinguished from linguistic and literary influence, that of the English-speaking area is more favourable to it. Where within that area the presence of a strong Scandinavian or Celtic element is apparent, there also story, legend and ballad are alike more numerous and more romantic in tone. That the most genuinely Low-German portions of the English-speaking area. East Anglia for instance, have not entirely lost the gift of racy popular humour so characteristic of Continental German folklore, is sufficiently proved by the admirable tale of Tom Tit Tot, collected in Suffolk by Mrs. Thomas, but first made known to the world at large by our last President. But as a whole the more unmixedly Low-German our English people is, the more it would seem to have forgotten the old traditional romance, the less capacity it would seem to have shown for transforming and endowing it with fresh life. As a matter of fact, the traditional romantic element which enters so largely into modern English literature is Celtic and not Germanic in origin.

One of the most fascinating problems in English popular literature is presented by the admirable body of ballad poetry recorded during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, partly in the southern but mainly in the northern portion of the English-speaking area of Britain. The language is English, the population among which the ballads were chiefly developed even if it did not originate