Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/64

lviii Iviii INTRODUCTION. that are bred in a book ; he hath not eat paper, as it were ; he hath not drunk ink ; his intellect is not replenished ..." That, surely, is no mystery. Let us collect a few signatures to this simple statement of belief. No man has done more for certain phases of poetry of the people than Ferdinand Wolf ; ^ and he definitely rejects "the nebulous poet-aggregate called folk." Talvj,^ too, has no love for Wilhelm Grimm's asser- tion that ballads make themselves ; and she tells us how they are made in reality. Singers, minstrels, compose them, — blind old men, as in Servia ; or, it may be, in some idyllic neighborhood, youth and maiden go about their daily tasks in a spirit of improvisation, and make little ballads while they herd or spin. Coming over to England, we have Bishop Percy's theory of minstrel authorship, and the scoffs of that very irritable, but startlingly well-informed person, Joseph Ritson. Ritson refers the origin of our English ballads to the reign of Queen Elizabeth ; and while we can find no mention of the mystery, we know pretty well what he would have thought about it.^ Of no different opinion, so far as the 1 Ueber die Laisj Sequenzen^ etc, 1841 — see pp. 48, 74, 125; Wiener Jahrbiichery CXVII, pp. 84 f., 121 f., 127; Proben portug. u. Catalan. Volksromanzen^ Sitzungsberichte d. Wien. Akad., Phil.-Hist. CI., XX, 17 ff. (March 12, 1856); and especially Introduction, Rosa Wan ens, Schwedische Volkslieder, 1857, p. xv. 2 Mrs. Robinson, bom v. Jacob. See her Versuch einer Charak- teristik d. Volkslieder germanischer Nationen, pp. 10, 338 f., 403 ff. 2nd ed., 181 3, p. Ixviii; also, in his Ancient Songs and Ballads, the Observations on the Minstrels, where he contemptuously concedes a few songs to the minstrels, but all " merely narrative " (ed. Hazlitt, p. xxi f.) ; and Dissertation on Romance and Minstrelsy, in his Ancient Engleish Metrical Roniancees. In this dissertation (original ed. (1802) I, V ff.), Ritson thinks the Gest of Robin Hood may well have been " composed by a priest in his closet 1 " Digitizecf by CjOOQIC
 * See Historical Essay in his Select Collection of English Songs,