Les serviteurs ne congnoissans le point Que nul d'eulz ne heut tant fiance en son heur, The trial by ordeal more probably originated in wisdom than in superstition. The Water of Jealousy is the oldest example. This seems to have been enjoined for enabling women, when unjustly suspected, fully to exculpate themselves; for no one who was guilty would have ventured upon the trial. I have heard an anecdote of John Henderson, which is characteristic of that remarkable man. The maid servant, one evening, at a house where he was visiting, begged that she might be excused from bringing in the tea, for he was a conjurer, she said. When this was told him, he desired the mistress would insist upon her coming in; this was done : he fixed his eye upon her, and after she had left the room said, Take care of her; she is not honest. It was soon found that he had rightly understood the cause of her alarm. One of our nation lost the maid he loved. XXII. p. 410, col. 1. There was a young man in despair for the death of his sister, whom he loved with extreme affection. The idea of the departed recurred to him incessantly. He resolved to seek her in the Land of Souls, and flattered himself with the hope of bringing her back with him. His voyage was long and laborious, but he surmounted all the obstacles, and overcame every difficulty. At length he found a solitary old man, or rather genius, who, having questioned him concerning his enterprise, encouraged him to pursue it, and taught him the means of success. He gave him a little empty calabash to contain the soul of his sister, and promised on his return to give him the brain, which he had in his possession, being placed there, by virtue of his office, to keep the brains of the dead. The young man profited by his instructions, finished his course successfully, and arrived in the Land of Souls, the inhabitants of which were much astonished to see him, and fled at his presence. Tharonbiaouagon received him well, and protected him by his counsel from the old woman his grandmother, who, under the appearance of a feigned regard, wished to destroy him by making him eat the flesh of serpents and vipers, which were to her delicacies. The souls being assembled to dance, as was their custom, he recognized that of his sister; Tharonhiaouagon assisted him to take it by surprise, without which help he never would have succeeded, for when he advanced to seize it, it vanished like a dream of the night, and left him as confounded as was Eneas when he attempted to embrace the shade of his father Anchises. Nevertheless he took it, confined it, and in spite of the attempts and stratagems of this captive soul, which sought but to deliver itself from its prison, he brought it back the same road by which he came to his own village. I know not if he recollected to take the brain, or judged it unnecessary; but as soon as he arrived, he dug up the body, and prepared it according to the instructions he had received, to render it fit for the reception of the soul, which was to reanimate it. Every thing was ready for this resurrection, when the impertinent curiosity of one of those who were present prevented its success. The captive soul, finding itself free, fled away, and the whole journey was rendered useless. The young man derived no other advantage than that of having been at the Land of Souls, and the power of giving certain tidings of it, which were transmitted to posterity. LAFITAU sur les Moeurs de Sauvages Ameriquains. Tom. I. p. 401. "One, I remember, affirmed to me that himself had been dead four days; that most of his friends in that time were gathered together to his funeral; and that he should have been buried, but that some of his relations at a great distance, who were sent for upon that occasion, were not arrived, before whose coming he came to life again. In this time he says he went to the place where the sun rises, (imagining the earth to be a plain,) and directly over that place, at a great height in the air, he was admitted, he says, into a great house, which he supposes was several miles in length, and saw many wonderful things, too tedious as well as ridiculous to mention. Another person, a woman, whom I have not seen, but been credibly informed of by the Indians, declares she was dead several days; that her soul went southward, and feasted and danced with the happy spirits; and that she found all things exactly agreeable to the Indian notions of a future state."BRAINERD. ...... that cheerful one, who knoweth all The songs of all the winged choristers. XXIII. p. 410, col. 2. The Mocking Bird is often mentioned, and with much feeling, in Mr. Davis's Travels in America, a very singular and interesting volume. He describes himself in one place as listening by moonlight to one that usually perched within a few yards of his log hut. A negress was sitting on the threshold of the next door, smoking the stump of an old pipe. Please God Almighty, exclaimed the old woman, how sweet that Mocking Bird sing! he never tire. By day and by night it sings alike; when weary of mocking others, the bird takes up its own natural strain, and so joyous a creature is it, that it will jump and dance to its own music. The bird is perfectly domestic, for the Americans hold it sacred. Would that we had more of these humane prejudices in England!—if that word may be applied to a feeling so good in itself and in its tendency. A good old Protestant missionary mentions another of the American singing-birds very technically. "Of black birds there be millions, which are great devourers of the Indian corn as soon as it appears out of the ground: unto this sort of birds, especially, may the mystical fowls, the Divells, be well resembled, (and so it pleaseth the Lord Jesus himself to observe, Matt. 13,) which mystical fowl follow the sowing of the word, pick it up from loose and careless hearers, as these black birds follow the material seed: against these they are very careful, both to set their corn deep enough, that it may have a strong root, not so apt to be pluckt up, as also they put up little watch-houses in the middle of their fields, in which they or their biggest children lodge." -ROGER WILLIAMS. The caryon Crowe, that lothsome beast, Which cries against the rayne, The Devill resembleth playne: The Devill so must we overthrowe GASCOIGNE's Good-morrow. But of all the songsters in America who warble their woodnotes wild, the frogs are the most extraordinary. "Prepared as I was," says a traveller, "to hear something extraordinary from these animals, I confess the first frog concert I heard in America was so much beyond any thing I could conceive of the powers of these musicians, that I was truly astonished. This performance was al fresco, and took place on the 18th, (April instant,) in a large swamp, where there were at least ten thousand performers, and, I really believe, not two exactly in the same pitch, if the octave can possibly admit of so many divisions, or shakes of semitones. An Hibernian musician, who, like myself, was present for the first time at this concert of antimusic, exclaimed, 'By Jasus, but they stop out of tune to a nicety!' "I have been since informed by an amateur who resided many years in this country, and made this species of music his peculiar study, that on these occasions the treble is performed by the Tree Frogs, the smallest and most beautiful species; they are always of the same color as the bark of the tree they inhabit, and their note is not unlike the chirp of a cricket: the next in size are our counter-tenors; they have a note resembling the setting of a saw. A still larger species sing tenor, and the under part is supported by the Bull Frogs, which are as large as a man's foot, and bellow out the bass in a tone as loud and sonorous as that of the animal from which they take their name."- Travels in America by W. PRIEST, Musician. "I have often thought," says this lively traveller, "if an enthusiastic cockney of weak nerves, who had never been out of the sound of Bow-bell, could suddenly be conveyed from his bed in the middle of the night, and laid fast asleep in an American swamp, he would, on waking, fancy himself in the infernal regions: his first sensations would be from the stings of a myriad of musquitoes; waking with the smart, his ears would be assailed with the horrid noises of the frogs; on lifting up his eyes, he would have a faint view of the night-hawks, flapping their ominous wings over his devoted head, visible only from the glimmering light of the fire-flies, which he would naturally conclude were sparks from the bottomless pit. Nothing would be wanting at this moment to complete the illusion, but one of those dreadful explosions of thunder and lightning, so extravagantly described by Lee in Edipus. 'Call you these peals of thunder but the yawn of bellowing clouds? By Jove, they seem to me the world's last groans, and those large sheets of flame its last blaze!'" In sink and swell More exquisitely sweet than ever art Or beat, or breath. — XXIII. p. 410, col. 2. The expression is from an old Spanish writer: "Tanian instrumentos de diversas maneras de la musica, de pulso, e flato, e tato, e voz."— Cronica de PERO NINO. the old, in talk Of other days, which mingled with their joy Memory of many a hard calamity. - XXIV. p. 411, col. 2. "And when the builders laid the foundation of the Temple of the Lord, they set the Priests in their apparel with trumpets, and the Levites the sons of Asaph with cymbals, to praise the Lord, after the ordinance of David, King of Israel. "And they sang together by course in praising and giving thanks unto the Lord, because he is good, for his mercy endureth forever toward Israel. And all the people shouted with a great shout when they praised the Lord, because the foundation of the house of the Lord was laid. "But many of the Priests and Levites and chief of the fathers, who were ancient men, that had seen the first house, when the foundation of this house was laid before their eyes, wept with a loud voice; and many shouted aloud with joy : "So that the people could not discern the noise of the shout of joy from the noise of the weeping of the people; for the people shouted with a loud shout, and the noise was heard afar off."- EZRA, iii. 10-13. Depart! depart! for so the note, Spake to the Azteca. - XXVII. p. 417, col. 1. My excuse for this insignificant agency, as I fear it will be thought, must be, that the fact itself is historically true; by means of this omen the Aztecas were induced to quit their country, after a series of calamities. The leader who had address enough to influence them was Huitziton, a name which I have altered to Yuhidthiton for the sake of euphony; the note of the bird is expressed in Spanish and Italian thus, tihui; the cry of the peewhit cannot be better expressed. — TORQUEMADA, 1. 2, c. 1. CLAVigero. The Chair of God.-XXVII. p. 419, col. 1. Mexitli, they said, appeared to them during their emigration, and ordered them to carry him before them in a chair; Teoycpalli it was called.—TORQUEMADA, 1. 2, c. 1. The hideous figures of their idols are easily accounted for by the Historian of the Dominicans in Mexico. "As often as the Devil appeared to the Mexicans, they made immediately an idol of the figure in which they had seen him; sometimes as a lion, other times as a dog, other times as a serpent; and as the ambitious Devil took advantage of this weakness, he assumed a new form every time to gain a new image in which he might be worshipped. The natural timidity of the Indians aided the design of the Devil, and he appeared to them in horrible and affrighting figures, that he might have them the more submissive to his will; for this reason it is that the idols which we still see in Mexico, placed in the corners of the streets as spoils of the Gospel, are so deformed and ugly. — Fr. Augustin DaviLA PADILLA. To spread in other lands Mexitli's name.—XXVII. p. 420, col. 1. It will scarcely be believed that the resemblance between Mexico and Messiah should have been adduced as a proof that America was peopled by the ten tribes. Fr. Estevan de Salazar discovered this wise argument, which is noticed in Gregorio Garcia's very credulous and very learned work on the Origin of the Indians, 1. 3, c. 7, § 2. 434 Ballads and Metrical Tales. VOL. I. PREFACE. MOST of the pieces in this volume were written in early life, a few are comparatively of recent date, and there are some of them which lay unfinished for nearly thirty years. friends with whom, in 1796, I had visited the Arrabida Convent near Setubal. By his means I obtained permission to make use of the books in the Cathedral Library; and accordingly I was locked dral where the books were kept in chains. So up for several mornings in that part of the CatheUpon reading, on their first appearance, certain little were these books used at that time, that, in of these Ballads, and of the lighter pieces now placing them upon the shelves, no regard had been comprised in the third volume of this collective had to the length of the chains; and when the edition,* Mr. Edgeworth said to me, "Take my volume which I wished to consult was fastened to word for it, Sir, the bent of your genius is for com- one of the upper shelves by a short chain, the only edy." I was as little displeased with the intended means by which it was possible to make use of it compliment as one of the most distinguished poets was, by piling upon the reading desk as many volof this age was with Mr. Sheridan, who, upon re-umes with longer chains as would reach up to the turning a play which he had offered for acceptance length of its tether; then, by standing on a chair, at Drury Lane, told him it was a comical tragedy. I was able to effect my purpose. There, and thus, My late friend, Mr. William Taylor of Norwich, I first read the story of the Old Woman of Berkeley, whom none who knew him intimately can ever in Matthew of Westminster, and transcribed it call to mind without affection and regret, has this into a pocket-book. I had no recollection of what :-"Not long had passed at Dr. Sayers's; but the circumstantial passage in his Life of Dr. Sayers: after this, (the year 1800,) Mr. Robert Southey vis- details in the monkish Chronicle impressed me so ited Norwich, was introduced to Dr. Sayers, and strongly, that I began to versify them that very partook those feelings of complacent admiration evening. It was the last day of our pleasant visit which his presence was adapted to inspire. Dr. at Hereford; and on the following morning the Sayers pointed out to us in conversation, as adapted remainder of the Ballad was pencilled in a postfor the theme of a ballad, a story related by Olaus chaise on our way to Abberley. Magnus of a witch, whose coffin was confined by three chains, sprinkled with holy water; but who was, nevertheless, carried off by demons. Already, I believe, Dr. Sayers had made a ballad on the subject; so did I, and so did Mr. Southey; but after seeing the Old Woman of Berkeley, we agreed in awarding to it the preference. Still, the very different manner in which each had employed the same basis of narration might render welcome the opportunity of comparison; but I have not found among the papers of Dr. Sayers a copy of his poem." There is a mistake here as to the date. This, my first visit to Norwich, was in the spring of 1798; and I had so much to interest me there in the society of my kind host and friend Mr. William Taylor, that the mention at Dr. Sayers's table of the story in Olaus Magnus made no impression on me at the time, and was presently forgotten. Indeed, if I had known that either he or his friend had written or intended to write a ballad upon the subject, that knowledge, however much the story might have pleased me, would have withheld me from all thought of versifying it. In the autumn of the same year, I passed some days at Hereford with Mr. William Bowyer Thomas, one of the Mr. Wathen, a singular and obliging person, who afterwards made a voyage to the East Indies, and published an account of what he saw there, traced for me a fac simile of a wooden cut in the Nurem berg Chronicle, (which was among the prisoners in the Cathedral.) It represents the Old Woman's forcible abduction from her intended place of burial. This was put into the hands of a Bristol artist; and the engraving in wood which he made from it was prefixed to the Ballad when first published, in the second volume of my poems, 1799. The Devil alludes to it in his Walk, when he complains of a certain poet as having "put him in ugly ballads, with libellous pictures, for sale." The passage from Matthew of Westminster was prefixed to the Ballad when first published, and it has continued to be so in every subsequent edition of my minor poems from that time to the present; for whenever I have founded either a poem, or part of cne, upon any legend, or portion of history, I have either extracted the passage to which I was indebted, if its length allowed, or have referred to it. Mr. Payne Collier, however, after the Ballad, with its parentage affixed, had been twenty years story from Heywood's Nine Books of various Hisbefore the public, discovered that I had copied the * Juvenile and Minor Poems, Vol. II., pp. 158-223 of this tory concerning Women, and that I had not edition, thought proper to acknowledge the obligation. The discovery is thus stated in that gentleman's Poetical Decameron, (vol. i. p. 323.) Speaking of the book, one of his Interlocutors says, "It is not of such rarity or singularity as to deserve particular notice now; only, if you refer to p. 443, you will find the story on which Mr. Southey founded his mock-ballad of the Old Woman of Berkeley. You will see, too, that the mode in which it is told is extremely similar. "MORTON. Had Mr. Southey seen Heywood's book? "BOURNE. It is not improbable; or some quotation from it, the resemblance is so exact; you may judge from the few following sentences." Part of Heywood's narration is then given; upon which one of the speakers observes, "The resemblance is exact, and it is not unlikely that Heywood and Southey copied from the same original.' Meer of Morridge in such a night as that; to which one of them replying, that, for a crown, or some such sum, he would undertake it, the rest, joining their purses, said he should have his demand. The bargain being struck, away he went on his journey with a stick in his hand, which he was to leave there as a testimony of his performance. At length, coming near the Meer, he heard the lamentable cries of this distressed woman, begging for mercy, which at first put him to a stand; but being a man of great resolution and some policy, he went boldly on, however, counterfeiting the presence of divers other persons, calling Jack, Dick, and Tom, and crying, Here are the rogues we look'd for, &c.; which being heard by the murderer, he left the woman and fled; whom the other man found by the Meer side almost stripped of her clothes, and brought her with him to Leek as an ample testimony of his having been at the Meer, and of God's providence too." - P. 291. The metre is Mr. Lewis's invention; and metre is one of the few things concerning which popularity may be admitted as a proof of merit. The ballad has become popular owing to the metre and the story; and it has been made the subject of a fine picture by Mr. Barker. 1. "BOURNE. Perhaps so; Heywood quotes Guillerimus in Special. Histor. lib. xxvi. c. 26. He afterwards relates, as Southey, that the Devil placed the Old Woman of Berkeley before him on a black WHO is yonder poor Maniac, whose wildly-fix'd horse, and that her screams were heard four miles off." eyes Seem a heart overcharged to express? 2. It cannot, however, be disputed, that Mr. Payne Collier has made one discovery relating to this subject; for he has discovered that the Old Woman of Berkeley is a mock-ballad. Certainly this was never suspected by the Author or any of his friends. It obtained a very different character in Russia, where, having been translated and published, it was prohibited for this singular reason, that children were said to be frightened by it. This I was told by a Russian traveller who called upon me at Kes- On that wither'd breast, and her weather-worn wick. KESWICK, 8th March, 1838. No pity she looks for, no alms doth she seek; cheek Hath the hue of a mortal despair. 3. Yet cheerful and happy, nor distant the day, Poor Mary the Maniac hath been; MARY, THE MAID OF THE The Traveller remembers who journey'd this way INN. The circumstances related in the following Ballad were told me, when a school-boy, as having happened in the north of England. Either Furnes or Kirkstall Abbey (I forget which) was named as the scene. The original story, how No damsel so lovely, no damsel so gay, 4. Her cheerful address fill'd the guests with delight When the wind whistled down the dark aisle. 5. She loved, and young Richard had settled the day, ever, is in Dr. Plot's History of Staffordshire. "Amongst the unusual accidents," says this amusing author, "that have attended the female sex in the course of their lives, I think I may also reckon the narrow escapes they have made from death. Whereof I met with one mentioned with admiration by every body at Leek, that happened not far off at the Black Meer of Morridge, which, though famous for nothing for which it is commonly reputed so, (as that it is bottomless, no cattle will drink of it, or birds fly over or settle upon it, all which I found false,) yet is so, for the signal deliverance of a poor woman enticed thither in a dismal, stormy night, by a bloody ruffian, who had first gotten her with child, and intended, in this remote inhospitable place, to have despatched her by drowning. 'Twas in autumn, and stormy and dark was the The same night (Providence so ordering it) there were several persons of inferior rank drinking in an alehouse at Leek, whereof one having been out, and observing the darkness and other ill circumstances of the weather, coming in again, said to the rest of his companions, that he were a stout man indeed that would venture to go to the Black But Richard was idle and worthless, and they night, 6. And fast were the windows and door; Where the old Abbey stands, on the common His gibbet is now to be seen; All around her was silent, save when the rude blast The traveller beholds them, and thinks with a sigh Howl'd dismally round the old pile; Over weed-cover'd fragments she fearlessly pass'd, And arrived at the innermost ruin at last, Where the elder-tree grew in the aisle. 14. Well pleased did she reach it, and quickly drew near, And hastily gather'd the bough; When the sound of a voice seem'd to rise on her ear, 15. The wind blew; the hoarse ivy shook over her head; Of poor Mary, the Maid of the Inn. Bristol, 1796. DONICA. "In Finland there is a Castle which is called the New Rock, moated about with a river of unsounded depth, the water black, and the fish therein very distasteful to the palate. In this are spectres often seen, which foreshow either the death of the Governor, or of some prime officer belonging to the place; and most commonly it appeareth in the shape |