“Methinks I hear the thresel-cock, Methinks I hear the jay; Methinks I hear my Lord Barnard, And I would I were away.”
“Lye still, lye still, thou Little Musgrave, And huddle me from the cold; ’Tis nothing but a shepherd’s boy A-driving his sheep to the fold.”
Lord Barnard breaks in and does his affair with the two of them. Then:
“‘A grave, a grave,’ Lord Barnard cryd, ‘To put these lovers in; But lay my lady on the upper hand, For she came of the better kin!’”
If Mr. Cecil Sharp, as I hope, is collecting his many and scattered publications under one roof, so to speak, he will be doing a service to a number of people besides me. I await his learned leisure, having now possessed myself of his _English Folk-Songs_, Vols. I and II. He will not achieve what I want to see done before I die, a _Corpus Poeticum Villanum_, because, being a musician before all things, he is only interested in peasant verse of which the music has survived. He won’t do that, but he will help somebody else towards it with an indispensable supplement to Child, in an accessible form; and that will be great gain--goodliness with contentment, in fact.
Valuable variants of many and many a folk-song are to be found in his first instalment; though such was the phenomenal patience and far-flung activity of the American that in two volumes of a hundred songs Mr. Sharp has only been able to find one which is not in the great work. That is one which would have delighted the Professor--“Bruton Town.” The _English and Scottish Popular Ballads_ contains nothing at all like “Bruton Town”; yet the theme of it is one of those which was common to every folk, no doubt, in Europe. Boccaccio gave it its first fame, Hans Sachs followed him. In England we had to wait for Keats, who, so far as we are concerned, supplanted the Florentine and the Nuremberger; for all the Britains know something of Isabella and the Pot of Basil. It must, however, be noted that the specific note of those masterpieces is not the real theme, and never could have been. The horrid dealings with the murdered man’s head are macabre embroidery altogether too sophisticated for a folk-tale. The real theme is the Squire of Low Degree. You get it in the “Duchess of Malfy,” and you get it in “Bruton Town.” There is no instance of the morbid in a peasant-ballad. Elemental human beings dealt in elemental passions. Love, pride, scorn, birth, death were concern enough for them. So, in “Bruton Town,” the theme is the trusty servant, his master’s daughter, the young men’s reprobation and vindication of their sister’s “honour.” Here is the opening: