[节选]A Collection of Ballads

She had no Marie Hamilton, no Marie Carmichael among her four

Maries, though a lady of the latter name was at her court.  But

early in the reign a Frenchwoman of the queen's was hanged, with

her paramour, an apothecary, for slaying her infant.  Knox mentions

the fact, which is also recorded in letters from the English

ambassador, uncited by Mr. Child.  Knox adds that there were

ballads against the Maries.  Now, in March 1719, a Mary Hamilton,

of Scots descent, a maid of honour of Catherine of Russia, was

hanged for child murder (CHILD, vi. 383).  It has therefore been

supposed, first by Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe long ago, later by

Professor Child, and then by Mr. Courthope, that our ballad is of

1719, or later, and deals with the Russian, not the Scotch,

tragedy.



To this we may reply (1) that we have no example of such a throwing

back of a contemporary event, in ballads.  (2) There is a version

(CHILD, viii. 507) in which Mary Hamilton's paramour is a

"pottinger," or apothecary, as in the real old Scotch affair.  (3)

The number of variants of a ballad is likely to be proportionate to

its antiquity and wide distribution.  Now only SIR PATRICK SPENS

has so many widely different variants as MARY HAMILTON.  These

could hardly have been evolved between 1719 and 1790, when Burns

quotes the poem as an old ballad.  (4) We have no example of a poem

so much in the old ballad manner, for perhaps a hundred and fifty

years before 1719.  The style first degraded and then expired:

compare ROB ROY and KILLIECRANKIE, in this collection, also the

ballads of LOUDOUN HILL, THE BATTLE OF PHILIPHAUGH, and others much

earlier than 1719.  New styles of popular poetry on contemporary

events as SHERRIFFMUIR and TRANENT BRAE had arisen.  (5) The

extreme historic inaccuracy of MARY HAMILTON is paralleled by that

of all the ballads on real events.  The mention of the Pottinger is

a trace of real history which has no parallel in the Russian

affair, and there is no room, says Professor Child, for the

supposition that it was voluntarily inserted by reciter or copyist,

to tally with the narrative in Knox's History.