THE EARL OF MAR'S DAUGHTER
[It is doubtful whether this ballad has any right to be included among the original works of Swinburne, but it gives interesting evidence of the activity of his mind and of his attitude to the old poetry of the Border. The MS. was found with those of several other ballads, most of them published in the Third Series of Poems and Ballads (1889), and was probably written in 1862 or 1863. At first sight it seems like an attempt to re-compose from memory the well-known ballad of "Earl Mar's Daughter," which was originally published in 1828 by Peter Buchan in his Ancient Ballads and Songs of the North of Scotland. The story is exactly identical, and the diction sometimes very close; for instance, the Allingham-Buchan version begins:—
Upon a simmers day,
The noble Earl Mar's daughter
Went forth to sport and play.
Below a green aik tree,
There she saw a sprightly doo
Set on a branch sae hie,"
and so forth. But what a closer study of the MS. shows is that Swinburne, conscious of much that is vulgar and modern in Buchan's version, was setting himself the task of re-composing the ballad in language more severely archaic. This was actually done, to some extent, by William Allingham in the Ballad Book of 1864, and it is possible that Allingham's partial success induced Swinburne to lay aside his project. He was, however, far ahead of his time in perceiving that a loose roughness of
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