THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 53 
tions of some of the great ballads, like the essential forms of many 
popular marchen, fables, and nursery rhymes, have been roving 
about the world for ages, like the wandering Jew, and are the com- 
mon inheritance of many peoples. The comparative method of 
investigation applied to popular stories shows some tales to be 
veritable cosmopolites, strangers nowhere; and the same method 
applied to the study of popular ballads, may have much to teach 
concerning them. But it is not strange that folk-poetry even in 
countries far apart should have. lineaments, and strong points in 
common. Human hearts throb with like passions under different 
skies. Good and evil, joy and sorrow, love and hate, temptation 
and self-abnegation, the unspeakable beauty of the earth below, and 
the heavens above, these—the ultimate elements of all poetry——are 
common to all lands and ages. 
Although the exact date of the older ballads cannot be deter- 
mined, some of them are undoubtedly closely related to the /azs, 
metrical romances and fabliaux, which came into vogue in England, 
soon after the Norman conquest... These romances, first in verse, 
and afterwards in prose, dealt with a variety of subjects, legendary 
and actual, amongst which were the exploits of Alexander the Great ; 
the fall of Troy; the legends of King Arthur; and those of the 
Holy Grail. These, and many similar topics, during the eleventh 
and twelfth centuries, were written in metrical form, and in the 
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries they were reduced to prose, and 
re-arranged in many shapes. Some of these romances are 
veritable art treasures; they were written in monasteries, and 
years of labor were bestowed on their initial letters, miniatures 
and decoration. Specimens of these manuscripts are still pre- 
served. They are jealously guarded in the great libraries of 
the world, not only for their rarity, but for the influence of 
such romances on the literature of Europe, and on the 
system of chivalry which dominated what was best in Europe for 
some centuries. Several of these romances were printed by the 
early printers. Caxton both translated and printed the ‘‘ Historyes 
of Troye,” and Sir Thomas Malory prepared for Caxton’s press a 
book of the Arthurian legends, which in our own time have been 
presented to the world anew with such melodious freshness by 
Tennyson. 
