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It is well known how great was Professor Child's scholarship in the branches of his Harvard work; and how especially, how uniquely, effective it was in the study of English and Scottish balladry to which he gave so many years of his life. He was a poet in his nature, and he wrought with passion as well as knowledge in the achievement of as monumental a task as any American has performed.

It was a school of American balladry quite at variance with the cheerful optimism of those I had heard from the Belknap-Jackson phonograph, where the persons are not dead at all but are gayly calling upon one another to come on and do a folkdance, or hear a band or crawl under things of that sort.

Full of the same roborific virility are his settings to the songs of Richard Hovey's writing, "Here's a Health to Thee, Roberts," "Barney McGee," and the "Stein Song." These songs have an exuberance of the roistering spirit, along with a competence of musicianship that lifts them above any comparison with the average balladry.

And then I became interested in British balladry a noble subject, for which I have always had a veneration and love, as the well-kept and profusely annotated volumes in cases 3, 6, and 9 in the front room are ready to prove to you at any time you choose to visit my quiet, pleasant home.

The greater portion of the "Harold" is obviously, in its coolness and neatness and lightness, the work of one who was unwilling to dishevel himself in the cause of expression, who outlined his sensations reticently rather than effusively, and stood always a little apart. The "Corsair" overture has not the wild, rich balladry of that of the "Flying Dutchman," perhaps.

I had heard that Joseph Ritson was buried here, and while my sister, Miss Susan, lingered at the grave of her favorite poet, I took occasion to spy around among the tombstones in the hope of discovering the last resting-place of the curious old antiquary whose labors in the field of balladry have placed me under so great a debt of gratitude to him.

The symphonies themselves are in a sense the stages of the essentialization. In the first of them his language emerges, to an extent imparting its unmistakable coloration to a matter perhaps not entirely distinguished. There is a looseness and lushness, a romanticism and balladry, in the work, that is not quite characteristic.

As Andrew Lang, scholar and lover of balladry, wrote long ago: "Ballads sprang from the very heart of the people and flit from age to age, from lip to lip of shepherds, peasants, nurses, of all the class that continues nearest to the state of natural man. The whole soul of the peasant class breathes in their burdens, as the great sea resounds in the shells cast up on the shores. The Ode

With all their smut and filth, they were yet full of naïve folk-touches and approximations to real balladry. I was as tender of the manuscript as a woman would be with her baby. The sky grew overcast. A rain storm blew up.

Bibliomania is beautiful as an entirety, as a symmetrical blending of a multitude of component parts, and he is indeed disloyal to the cause who, through envy or shortsightedness or ignorance, argues to the discredit of angling, or Napoleonana, or balladry, or Indians, or Burns, or Americana, or any other branch or phase of bibliomania; for each of these things accomplishes a noble purpose in that each contributes to the glory of the great common cause of bibliomania, which is indeed the summum bonum of human life.