336	BALKAN BALLADS
that of the great collector Vuk Stepan Karadzic was mature. It is
not so much a loss of invention that one notes—for the devices
were always common property—but a kind of ageing and stiffening
of the ballad-style, a restriction within limits and a failure to sur-
prise. A certain collection of Popular Songs concerning the first
national Insurrection (Belgrade, 1914), though adorned with photos
of fiercely whiskered bravoes, opens with cliches in almost every
poem:
 1.	In a vision dreamed a pretty maiden , . .
 2.	God of mercy! What a mighty marvel! . . .
 3.	Fluttered thither two black-coated ravens . . .
 4.	Captain Kulin quickly massed his army . . .
 5.	Wine were drinking three young Serbian voivods . , .

 17.	Pens a letter a black-visaged Arab . . .
 18.	Screamed the vila high on Rudnik's mountain,
by the streamlet, slender Jasenica,
o'er Topola's plain she sent her summons,
called upon him, Petrovidu Djoko . . .
These had been fine things once, but they had lost a good deal of
their truth. The full-mouthed phrases could be strung together
with too much ease, and they slipped into garrulous and prosaic
contexts. Yet this art, though declining, is still, in Montenegro, the
chief recreation of a simple, sturdy race, and sets the pattern for
their lives.
There are some curious and interesting religious ballads in
Yugoslavia, in which the authentic version of the Bible or hagio-
logy has been transformed by a naive use of the imagination. They
are collected in Buric's first volume, and open the second of Kara-
dzic. Thus, in Christ's Birth (Buric, i. i), we learn that Mary was a
sheep-farmer and John and Simeon were hired men; Jesus is taken,
like any Serbian baby, to be baptized at once, and the only differ-
ence is that the Jordan and Judaean hills do him prodigious
reverence; a Yule feast is ordered when the hired men return. In
Rich Gavan's Lady (Karadzic, i. 207) the parable of Dives and
Lazarus is turned to the disadvantage of Dives' wife. It is a beggars*
ballad, along with Deacon Stephen and two Angels (Buric, i. 3).
St. Peter's mother has a bad reputation and is sent to hell; and
Fiery Mary (Buric, i. 4) saw in hell various sinners, including one
who had been a bad daughter, bad wife, and bad mother, and so
was altogether bad, like the Samaritan Magdalene of western ballad