Page:Posthumous poems (IA posthumousswinb00swin).pdf/19

 Lamb, of Norham, communicated to him a ballad with that title, which Hutchinson printed in 1776. It has long been admitted that this was a forgery, although Lamb pretended to have copied it "from an ancient manuscript," and attributed it to an unknown medieval poet, Duncan Frasier. But there have been reported other ballads on the same subject, and it is now generally admitted that there existed, and still survived near the end of the eighteenth century, a genuine ancient ballad of "The Worm of Spindlestoneheugh." It was, moreover, the opinion of Professor Child that Lamb must have woven into his forgery a good many strands of the lost original.

Between these fragments and imitations, and Swinburne's spirited poem, there is practically no resemblance, except in the conventional description of the Worm, or fire-drake, the tradition of which seems to have been widely diffused. In the genuine ballad of "The Hagg Worm," we read—

Word's gone cast, and word's gone west, And word's gane over the sea,— There's a laidler worm in Spindlestoneheughs Will destroy the North Countree."

The metamorphosis of a beautiful maiden into a snake, dragon or "worm," the Schlangenjungfrau of Icelandic saga and Teutonic legend, is