I have obeyed a profound conviction which I have reason to hope
will be more commended in the future than perhaps it can be now, in
leaving aside a multitude of composite songs--anachronisms, and
worse than mere anachronisms, as I think them to be, for they patch
wild feeling with sentiment of the sentimentalist. There are some
exceptions. The one fine stanza of a song which both Sir Walter
Scott and Burns restored is given with the restorations of both,
those restorations being severally beautiful; and the burden,
"Hame, hame, hame," is printed with the Jacobite song that carries
it; this song seems so mingled and various in date and origin that
no apology is needed for placing it amongst the bundle of Scottish
ballads of days before the Jacobites. Sir Patrick Spens is treated
here as an ancient song. It is to be noted that the modern, or
comparatively modern, additions to old songs full of quantitative
metre--"Hame, hame, hame," is one of these--full of long notes,
rests, and interlinear pauses, are almost always written in
anapaests. The later writer has slipped away from the fine,
various, and subtle metre of the older. Assuredly the popularity
of the metre which, for want of a term suiting the English rules of
verse, must be called anapaestic, has done more than any other
thing to vulgarise the national sense of rhythm and to silence the
finer rhythms.
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