Page:Posthumous poems (IA posthumousswinb00swin).pdf/14

 of their text, started the theory that all the romantic Scottish ballads had enjoyed revision by Elizabeth, Lady Wardlaw, about the year 1700. This was absurd, and the best critics perceived the fascinating beauty of texts which were manifestly antique. But still the notion persisted that a "modern" ballad must be neater, smoother and less savage than a genuine product of the old Northumbrian border.

It is doubtless to this prejudice, which was still universal sixty years ago, that we owe the fact that Swinburne's best border ballads have remained unpublished to this day. In 1862, which is the date to which we attribute "Lord Soulis" and "Lord Scales," Swinburne was in the constant society of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, to whose judgment he appealed on every occasion, and to whom all his poems were recited directly they were composed. Rossetti himself was greatly interested in resuscitating this form of lyric, and in "Stratton Water" we have an example of his success in composing an "imitation" ballad of real merit. With this may be compared Swinburne's own "We were ten maidens in the green corn" and "Stand up, stand up, thou Mary Janet" of the volume of 1866. In these published ballads of Rossetti and Swinburne a great deal of the simplicity of the originals is preserved, but there is a literary pre-occupation,