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These chronicles and registers on the one hand, and the hymns, laws, and formulas of various kinds on the other, formed the only written literature existing in the times before the Punic wars. Besides these, there, were a few speeches, such as that of Ap. Much importance has been assigned by Niebuhr and others to the ballad literature that clustered round the great names of Roman history.
In one corner of this seat reclined a figure bent with age, her face concealed by a thick veil. In the other corner was an old cheerful-looking woman, busily knitting, and mumbling rather than singing a quaint old ballad. The mistress of Coote-down made a feeble attempt to rise when my cousin presented me; but I entreated her to keep her seat.
"'Tommy Linn is a Scotchman born, His head is bald and his beard is shorn; He had a cap made of a hare skin, An elder man is Tommy Limn! "There was a sort of prophecy respecting my ancestor's descendants darkly insinuated in the concluding stanza of this ballad: "'Tommy Linn, and his wife, and his wife's mother, They all fell into the fire together; They that lay undermost got a hot skin,
No lack of blood in them, to stock a raw shilling's worth or gush before Achilles rageing. You perceive the picture, you can almost sing the ballad. We want only a few names of the fallen. It was the carving of a maitre chef, according to Skepsey: right-left-and point, with supreme precision: they fell, accurately sliced from the joint.
Here some big, white stones, peeping from the golden pools, made a passage to the other side, and the trim lassie began to pick her way daintily across. Gilbert watched her with amused pleasure. He seemed to have stepped into some old rustic ballad. What was that song the boys used to sing at college?
He says: "The ballad called Glenfinlas was, I think, the first original poem which I ventured to compose. After Glenfinlas, I undertook another ballad, called The Eve of St. John. The incidents, except the hints alluded to in the notes, are entirely imaginary; but the scene was that of my early childhood.
As to the ballad, dearest Miss Mitford, which you and Mr. Kenyon are indulgent enough to like, remember that he passed his criticism over it before it went to you and so if you did not find as many obscurities as he did in it, the reason is his merit and not mine. But don't believe him no! don't believe even Mr. Kenyon whenever he says that I am perversely obscure.
To obtain the right to join the ring she had to chant a scrap of a ballad. We sat round her, and in a fresh, clear voice she sang one of the old ballads of romance, full of love and sadness . . . As she sang, the shadow of the great trees grew deeper, and the broad light of the risen moon fell on her alone, she standing without the listening circle.
While the two were engaged in this conversation, they perceived some one with a pair of mules approaching the spot where they stood, and from the noise the plough made, as it dragged along the ground, they guessed him to be some labourer who had got up before daybreak to go to his work, and so it proved to be. He came along singing the ballad that says
Except Kate, I have had no vision of excellence this year, and she passed by like the queen on her coronation day; you don't know whether you saw her or not. Kate is fifteen; I go about moping, and sing the old, pathetic ballad I used to like in my youth, "She's sweet fifteen, I'm one year more. Mrs. Bland sang it in boy's clothes the first time I heard it.
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