Lays of Ancient Rome | Page 5

Cuthullin and Fingal. The long struggle of the Servians against
the Ottoman power was recorded in lays full of martial spirit. We learn
from Herrera that, when a Peruvian Inca died, men of skill were
appointed to celebrate him in verses, which all the people learned by
heart, and sang in public on days of festival. The feats of Kurroglou,
the great freebooter of Turkistan, recounted in ballads composed by
himself, are known in every village of northern Persia. Captain
Beechey heard the bards of the Sandwich Islands recite the heroic
achievements of Tamehameha, the most illustrious of their kings.
Mungo Park found in the heart of Africa a class of singing men, the
only annalists of their rude tribes, and heard them tell the story of the
victory which Damel, the negro prince of the Jaloffs, won over
Abdulkader, the Mussulman tyrant of Foota Torra. This species of
poetry attained a high degree of excellence among the Castilians,
before they began to copy Tuscan patterns. It attained a still higher
degree of excellence among the English and the Lowland Scotch,
during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. But it reached
its full perfection in ancient Greece; for there can be no doubt that the
great Homeric poems are generically ballads, though widely
distinguished from all other ballads, and indeed from almost all other
human composition, by transcendent sublimity and beauty.
As it is agreeable to general experience that, at a certain stage in the
progress of society, ballad-poetry should flourish, so is it also agreeable
to general experience that, at a subsequent stage in the progress of
society, ballad-poetry should be undervalued and neglected.
Knowledge advances; manners change; great foreign models of
composition are studied and imitated. The phraseology of the old
minstrels becomes obsolete. Their versification, which, having received
its laws only from the ear, abounds in irregularities, seems licentious
and uncouth. Their simplicity appears beggarly when compared with
the quaint forms and gaudy coloring of such artists as Cowley and
Gongora. The ancient lays, unjustly despised by the learned and polite,
linger for a time in the memory of the vulgar, and are at length too
often irretrievably lost. We cannot wonder that the ballads of Rome
should have altogether disappeared, when we remember how very
narrowly, in spite of the invention of printing, those of our own country
and those of Spain escaped the same fate. There is indeed little doubt

that oblivion covers many English songs equal to any that were
published by Bishop Percy, and many Spanish songs as good as the
best of those which have been so happily translated by Mr. Lockhart.
Eighty years ago England possessed only one tattered copy of Childe
Waters and Sir Cauline, and Spain only one tattered copy of the noble
poem of the Cid. The snuff of a candle, or a mischievous dog, might in
a moment have deprived the world forever of any of those fine
compositions. Sir Walter Scott, who united to the fire of a great poet
the minute curiosity and patient diligence of a great antiquary, was but
just in time to save the precious relics of the Minstrelsy of the Border.
In Germany, the lay of the Nibelungs had been long utterly forgotten,
when, in the eighteenth century, it was, for the first time, printed from a
manuscript in the old library of a noble family. In truth, the only people
who, through their whole passage from simplicity to the highest
civilization, never for a moment ceased to love and admire their old
ballads, were the Greeks.
That the early Romans should have had ballad-poetry, and that this
poetry should have perished, is therefore not strange. It would, on the
contrary, have been strange if these things had not come to pass; and
we should be justified in pronouncing them highly probable even if we
had no direct evidence on the subject. But we have direct evidence of
unquestionable authority.
Ennius, who flourished in the time of the Second Punic War, was
regarded in the Augustan age as the father of Latin poetry. He was, in
truth, the father of the second school of Latin poetry, the only school of
which the works have descended to us. But from Ennius himself we
learn that there were poets who stood to him in the same relation in
which the author of the romance of Count Alarcos stood to Garcilaso,
or the author of the Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode to Lord Surrey. Ennius
speaks of verses which the Fauns and the Bards were wont to chant in
the old time, when none had yet studied the graces of speech, when
none had yet climbed the peaks sacred to the Goddesses of Grecian
song. ``Where,'' Cicero mournfully asks, ``are those old verses now?''
Contemporary