Page:Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry - 1887.djvu/12

8 upon record the latest memories of the itinerant storyteller in whom the earliest form of our national literature, once dependent wholly on the recitations of the Scóp and gleeman, after many changes finally became extinct. At this day, probably, there is not one man left in the three kingdoms who earns his bread by carrying from house to house, for oral recitation, the tales and traditions of his country-side. At the end of the last century such a custom, as Allan Cunningham here tells us, was not wholly extinct. Though his Traditional Tales may be mainly of his own invention, they are the outcome of a mind that had been in much real contact with North Country peasantry, had taken eager delight in their "stories told of many a feat," and felt the music in them. The free sprinkling of song over the tales, gives us the pleasant sense also that our entertainer is a poet, while, however out of fashion some points in his style may be, we feel the artist in his prose.

Next flight is upward to the heights again.

H. M.