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Lays of Ancient Rome-Part1_Thomas Babbington Macaulay(1800-1859)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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by the Anglo-Saxons and those of Canute by the Danes, in rude

poems, of which a few fragments have come down to us. The chants



of the Welsh harpers preserved, through ages of darkness, a faint

and doubtful memory of Arthur. In the Highlands of Scotland may



still be gleaned some relics of the old songs about 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






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