woman of Berkshire, who with the White Horse and the Dragon's Hill before her eyes, was far from clear whether the battles they commemorated had not been a review, the firing of which she herself had heard. Naseby Field is said to be believed to be haunted with battle noises, but in general we fear that where the spot is remembered at all, it is only as a local lion, attracting strangers and bringing profit.

There is no perspective in the popular mind. Even in the Keltic, and therefore naturally imaginative Cornwall, the terrible Tregeagle figures as an unjust attorney of not many generations ago, but falls in with ancient British hermits, and saints; and the saints have the characters and powers of their predecessors the giants, hurl rocks about, and even pelt each other, as did SS. Just and Sennan, whose two rocks met midway in the air, united, and formed one enormous granite mass. All that is before the memory of the grandmother of the oldest inhabitant,' is in one plane of far antiquity, including King Arthur, Oliver Cromwell, and the French Revolution. Christmas mummers in the south of England always call St. George 'King Geaarge,' a village girl who was taken to see Windsor Castle, wrote to her mother that she had seen the "old King killing the dragon," and in Cornwall there is scarcely a tradition about King Arthur himself.

Without cultivation there seems to be an essential vulgarity in the English mind. Witness the deterioration of ballads that have been current among the people in England compared with those that have had the same lot in Scotland. For instance, we will take the mournful ditty where the jealous elder sister drowns the younger. In the Scottish ballad the

miller is thus summoned :

O father, father, draw your dam,

Binnorie, O Binnorie!

There's either a mermaid or milk-white swan,
By the bonnie mill-dams o' Binnorie.

After drawing out the unfortunate lady—

'He made a harp of her breast-bone,

Binnorie, O Binnorie!

Whose sounds would melt a heart of stone,
By the bonnie mill-dams o' Bionorie.

The strings he framed of her yellow hair,
Binnorie, O Binnorie!

Whose notes made sad the listening ear,

By the bonnie mill-dams o' Binnorie.
He brought it to her father's hall,

Binnorie, O Binnorie!

And there was the Court assembled all,
By the bonnie mill-dams o' Binnorie.

He laid his harp upon a stone,
Binnorie, O Binnorie!

And straight it began to play alone,

By the bonnie mill-dams o' Binnorie.
O. yonder sits my father, the king,
Binnorie, O Binnorie!

And yonder sits my mother, the queen,

By the bonnie mill-dams o' Binnorie.
And yonder stands my brother Hugh,
Binnorie, O Binnorie!

And by him my William, sweet and true,
By the bonnie mill-dams o' Binnorie.
But the last tune the harp played then,
Binnorie, O Binnorie!

Was "Woe to my sister, false Helen,"

By the bonnie mill-dams o' Binnorie.'

We quote from Mr. Chambers' version, but the wild weird, ghastly beauty is the same in every Scotch variety, but contrast the poetic grandeur of this poem, every word of which is homely, with the two English versions given in Mr. Hughes' Scouring of the White Horse.' The Berkshire runs thus, as to the discovery of the body :

'O father, O father; here swims a swan,

Hey down, bow down.

Very like a drowned gentlewoman,
And I'll be true to my true love

If my love be true to me.

The miller, he fot his pole and hook,

Hey down, bow down,

And he fished the fair maid out of the brook,

And I'll be true to my true love,

If my love be true to me.

O miller! I'll give thee guineas ten,

If thou'lt fetch me back to my father again.

The miller, he took her guineas ten,

And he pushed the fair maid in again.

But the coroner has come, and the justice, too,
With a hue and cry, and a hullabaloo.
They hanged the miller beside his own gate,
For drowning the varmer's daughter, Kate.
The sister, she went beyond the seas,
And died an old maid among black savagees.

So, I've ended my tale of the West countree,
And they calls it the Barkshire tragedee.'

The other version, from the Welsh border, describes minutely how a fiddle was constructed from the poor lady's interior, and reproached all the family-but oh! how unlike the Scottish harp-and ending with the true legal consolation ;

There sits the crowner, Uncle Joe,
Which comforteth poor me;

He'll hold his crowner's quest, I know,
To get his crowner's fee.'

There is a certain grim humour in both these, and the last almost looks like a conscious travestie of Binnorie: but scarcely any genuine ballad of the English populace is otherwise than grotesquely ridiculous, even when most horrible. The very best always have some painful triviality and absurdity; the Children in the Wood' itself is full of paltrinesses; Widdrington and his stumps spoil Chevy Chase, at best greatly inferior to the Scottish Battle of Otterburn, where Douglas's death is marvellously beautiful; and the uniform conclusion of ballads of unhappy lovers is wilful bathos. Denmark, the prolific source of ballads, we believe, invented the regulation termination by which

'The one was buried within the church,

The other within the choir,

And out of the one there grew a birch,
And out of the other a briar.'

Scotland, the country of burying lands in desolated convent churches, touchingly made the two to intertwine, but some practical Englishman caused the sexton to hack them down with his hook because they encumbered the path. Is it that the English nature so revolts in indignation at having been touched, that it immediately makes game of the subject? Or is it that there is absolutely no sense of the ridiculous? Whatever has been orally transmitted, such as the mumming dialogues, carols, May-day songs, &c., have always become hopelessly confused and vulgarised in a manner that, if we may trust collectors, does not befal the songs and rhymes of Scotland, Denmark, Germany, Brittany, or Italy.

English poetic genius stands as high as that of any other nation, but it would appear as if appreciation of the poetical was, in our own country, confined to the cultivated classes. Abroad though the demarcation of rank was more defined, yet everywhere but in France there was less dissimilarity of feeling between the gentleman and peasant, than here, where the one might be the more refined, but the other less so. Moreover, learning has probably never been out of reach of an intelligent person in England, since Richard II. refused to grant his nobles' petition that their serfs might be forbidden to learn to read. First monasteries, then grammar, and dame, schools put book learning within the reach of any one whose mind was active enough to seek for it; and a clever lad, rising into the position of a scholar, left the homely songs of tradition to those who had

not the sentiment to mould them, or even the power to preserve them accurately.

Peace and prosperity are also very depoetizing elements, since they leave no landmarks in the mind, and on a silent people, much absorbed in present interests, and happily without a notion of long standing family feuds. Traditions are hardly ever handed on-among what we are no longer allowed to call the genuine Anglo Saxons. Celtic or Danish admixtures make a great difference in the tenacity of traditions, and thus all the best and fullest come from our northern and western countries, which often explain otherwise incomprehensible usages and sayings of the south and east.

Folk Lore may be classified as consisting of beliefs in supernatural appearances; of customs, spells and sayings, and of old stories; and eeah class of these are partly derived from old heathen, partly from Christian usages.

Among these, the most universal and abiding article of popular credence is the appearance of ghosts. This hardly deserves to be termed mere popular superstition, for we verily believe that more thoughtful and cultivated persons would confess that they regarded such phantoms as veritable mysteries, than could now be found to acknowledge any faith in them among the half educated; but as it was among the untaught that the traditions were fostered and preserved, ghosts are classed among vulgar fables.

The question has often been carefully argued, and the result seems to be that there is no impossibility in a certain intercourse between the departed spirit and persons still living, and therefore that each single instance must rest on its own evidence. The favourite Reductio ad absurdum is that, when a ghost is seen in the ordinary dress of the person it represents, the question is asked whether these are the ghosts of the garments? but this scems to us unreasonable. When we think of our friends, they appear before our mind's eye attired as we are used to see them, and thus by whatever means the impression of the presence of the deceased is produced, the memory recalls him as he has appeared in life There is no doubt that the senses often imagine themselves to have been cognizant of that which has produced an effect on the mind, e.g., though an earthquake is silent in itself, yet from the similarity of the sensations it occasions with those produced by a thunderstorm, it is common to believe that there is a rumbling sound underground; and in the instance of a ship of war lying at anchor off New Zealand, where the concussion resembled the shock of the discharge of cannon, many persons below thought that they heard the report of all the guns fired off at once, while those on deck were con

vinced that there had been no sound at all. Many supernatural appearances, related in good faith, may thus be accounted for, without the eyes and ears having been concerned. Spirit may communicate with spirit, though no outward figure be pictured on the retina, no vibration meet the tympanum, yet these are so exclusively the media of perception that the mind and memory believe the impression to have been conveyed through them. This must be the case in a dream.

Allowing, however, for much imagination, much imposture and exaggeration, there is a large residuum of apparitions that have never been disproved, and which can only be wondered at. The most frequent and best authenticated of these are the cases in which the wraith or phantom of a person dying or recently dead, manifests itself. Madame de Genlis tells us in her memoirs that she and her only son, a child of three years old, sickened at the same time with the measles, and the child's death was kept a secret from her by her friends, but from the moment he expired till she recovered, she saw him continually hovering over her on the top of the bed, and that she felt no doubt of the true state of the case. Whether this deserves to be called a sick mother's fancy, or whether the lively lady herself be worthy of credit, this is only one of many such stories. A maid servant in the family of Sir Stamford Raffles was one night sitting alone in the kitchen, when she saw her soldier brother, then in India, pass before her, with a handkerchief that she had given him, round his head. It proved that at this very time, he had almost, with his last breath, desired to have his head bound with his sister's handkerchief. Mr. Henderson has another story to the same effect, on the authority of a clerical friend, who heard it from the aunt who witnessed it. She was about fourteen years old, when, as she was playing with the children of a gentleman living near Ripon, one of them cried, 'Why, there is brother walking at the bottom of the garden.' The whole set of children distinctly recognised the form and features of the brother, who was then in India, and one ran into the house and told her father, who made light of it to her, but noted the day and hour, and these of course corresponded with the time of the young man's death.

We give another instance on the authority of Mrs. Schimmelpenninck, whose stern realistic breeding was no school for credulity :

'I will close these anecdotes with one of a different description. At a distance of sixty or more years, I cannot vouch for the accuracy of my memory in its subordinate details, but of its substantial correctness I am sure, having frequently heard it from Dr. and Mrs. Priestly, and many years after from the medical man, the late Dr. Allsop, of Calne, who was concerned in it;

and