630 Trail met ions. 



And the second stanza : — 



" My lady is uukynde pordf." 



" Alack ! why is she so ''. " 

 " She loveth an other better than me ; 



And yet she will say no." 



The Bishop remarks, " Yet the first stanza appears to be defective, and it 

 should seem that a line is wanting, unless the first four words were 

 lengthened in the time." But the two fragmentary lines — • 



A, Robyn, 

 Jolly Robyn, 



• — simply form half of a Romance verse ; and the stanza runs trippingly 

 as^ — 



(12«.) " A, Robyn, jolly Robyn, 



Tell me how thy leman doeth, 

 And thou shalt know of myn." 



— -which, again, forms half of a " Dowsabel " stanza. These fragmentary 

 lines give body to a certain thought that lies at the back of the mind when 

 it is said that the Romance verse is the average length of a spoken or recited 

 sentence — ^the thought that in old ballads, newly taking shape, there must 

 have been many sentences that either exceeded or fell short of the average. 

 These eiTatic verses would naturally be altered to conform to type, or if 

 they proved inconformable they would be replaced by others, and would 

 in either case disappear. If, indeed, they were possessed of sufficient 

 vitality, and were on the lines of natural development, they would become 

 established as permanent variations, or might even supplant the parent 

 type, becoming themselves the new type from which subsequent variations 

 would flow. The latter is the case with the Ballad metre, which threatened 

 to supplant the Romance metre ; the former is the case as regards the 

 pi'rmanent variations of the Alexandrine and Nibelungen metres. This 

 constant alteration and development was a process at first largely carried 

 on in the minds of the. singers or reciters : a verse that sounded harsh when 

 recited by one poet would be altered by another with perhaps a finer ear, 

 and so the change would go on until the whole poem was conformable to 

 type, or until it had been caught and set up by a scribe, becoming an 

 example for all time. Even after a poem had been committed to manu- 

 script, and often during that very process, it underwent new changes, until, 

 excepting for the matter, the two forms can hardly be recognized as being 

 originally one and the same. 



6. A short study of the " Ancient Ballad of Chevy Chase " will reveal 

 the existence of many varieties of verses, some of which are now fixed types, 

 but most of which are obsolete. One stanza is printed by Bishop Percy : — 



(13.) " Nay [then] " sayd the lord Perse, 

 " I tolde it the biforne. 

 That I wolde never yeldyde be 

 To no man of woman born." 



(P<art ii, .stanza 11.) 



The " then " of the first line was inserted by Percy, so that in the manu- 

 script the stanza had a very different opening : — 



(13o.) " Nay " sayd the lord Perse, 

 " 1 tolde it the biforne, 



Divided, the two forms side by side are, — 



(V.U>.) " Nay/ then " .sayd/ the lord/ Persi-/, '" 1 tolde/ it the/ biforne/, 



" Nay " sayd/ the lord/ Perse/, / '• 1 tolde/ it the/ biforne/, 



[or] " Nay "/ sayd the lord/ Per.se/, / " 1 toldo/ it the/ biforne/, 



