THE ASCENT OF BALLADS 123

were patterned on those of Amadis de Gaula. The ballads, no
longer the main butt of Cervantine irony, persist through the great
novel as a lingering echo; and it is out of the ballads that Cervantes
fashions the central episode of his Second Part.1

Shakespeare, like Cervantes in so many ways, enjoyed his ballad.
He quoted

Some men for sudden joy do weep,
and some in sorrow sing,

from the 'Godly and virtuous song or Ballad made by the constant
member of Christ, John Careless, being in prison in the King's
Bench for professing His word; who, ending his days therein, was
thrown out and buried most ignominiously upon a dunghill, by the
adversaries of God's word'. Making the fullest possible use of the
amatory, journalistic, satirical, and pious ballads that poured from
Elizabethan presses,2 Shakespeare, not having the fortune to be a
Scot, rarely laid hands on such fine traditional matter as Child
Roland to the dark tower came* A mass of traditional and semi-
popular poetry was gathered into a folio manuscript during the
reign of Charles I, but not published. In 1765 Thomas Percy pub-
lished extracts from this folio along with Scottish and Northumbrian
ballads which were communicated to him, thus suddenly revealing
the wealth of the tradition buried under the journeyman produc-
tions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The effect was
electrical. It was felt first, and most strongly, in Germany, where
Hanover was at that time part of the English domain.4 In the
university of Gottingen, Holty indoctrinated his pupils with a new
conception of poetry, basing his style on Percy. This constituted,
according to Kayser, 'the foundation of the serious ballad' in Ger-
many, and a coping stone was soon found in Burger's Lenore (1773).
Despite the excessive literalness of its opening verses and the
sensationalism of its 'hurre, hurre, hopp, hopp, hopp', this trans-
formation of a Low German folk-song under the influence of
Sweet William1 s Ghost had no small measure of the forthrightness
and vigour of the ballad, together with its atmosphere of super-

1 R. Menendez Pidal, Un Aspecto en la elaboration del Quijote, Madrid, 1920.

2 Sir C. Firth, 'Ballads and Broadsides', Essays, Oxford, 1938; 'Ballads that
illustrate Shakespeare', Percy's Reliques, Book the Second.

3 It is an offshoot of the Scandinavian Rosmer Havmand.

4 This matter is fully discussed in W. Kayser, Geschichte der deutschen
Ballade, Berlin, 1936, and in F. Arnold, Das deutsche Volkslied, Prenzlau, 1927
(4th ed.).