IF Wolf's famous theory regarding the authorship of the Iliad were the true one, that great classic Integer whom we call Homer, and whose familiar bust in stucco has so long presided over our bookshelves, would have to descend from his eminent position, and be broken up into fragments, each of the 'disjecta membra poetæ' representing an individual rhapsodist. If Mr. Robert Chambers has, in his recent publication on the Romantic Scottish Ballads,* propounded the correct doctrine as to the authorship of the pieces he particularly refers to, an effect of an opposite kind will follow. A number of Scottish Ballads, hitherto supposed to be the production of various unknown rhymers living at different periods and in different parts of the country, will have to be assigned to one Scottish lady who amused herself with verse-making, 'and cutting paper with her scissors,' in the early part of last century. Let such a claim be established, and she deserves a bust in marble. In Chambers's Edinburgh Journal for 1843, I recollect seeing a brief notice of the ballad of Sir Patrick Spence, and an attempt made to prove it to be the composition of the authoress of Hardyknute, one of the minor literary impositions of last century. What was only in the bud in 1843 has, in the course of sixteen years, become full-blown, and now Mr. Chambers states-'I have arrived at the conclusion that the high-class romantic ballads of Scotland are not ancient compositions-are not older than the early part of the eighteenth century—and are mainly, if not wholly, the production of one mind. Whose was * The Romantic Scottish Ballads: their Epoch and Authorship; being the First of a Series of Edinburgh Papers, by Robert Chambers, F.R.S.E., F.S.A.Sc., F.G.S., F.L.S., &c. author of 'Traditions of Edinburgh.' William and Robert Chambers, London and Edinburgh. 1859. 197978 |