It should be stated that there is another theory altogether as to the origin of ballads. Instead of regarding them as a slow, shadowed, natural growth, finally fossilized in print, from the rhythmic cries of a barbaric dance-circle in its festal hour, there is a weighty school of critics who hold them to be the mere rag-tag camp-followers of mediaeval romance. See, for instance, the clownish ballad of _Tom Thumbe,_ with its confused Arthurian echoes. Some of the events recorded in our ballads, moreover, are placed by definite local tradition at a comparatively recent date, as _Otterburne, Edom o' Gordon, Kinmont Willie._ What becomes, then, of their claims to long descent? If these do not fall, it is because they are based less on the general theme and course of the story, matters that seem to necessitate an individual composer, than on the so-called communal elements of refrain, iteration, stock stanzas, stock epithets, stock numbers, stock situations, the frank objectivity of the point of view, the sudden glimpses into a pagan world. In the lands of the schoolhouse, the newspaper, and the public library, the conditions of ballad-production are past and gone. Yet there are still a few isolated communities in Europe where genuine folk-songs of spontaneous composition may be heard by the eavesdropper and jotted down with a surreptitious pencil; for the rustics shrink from the curiosity of the learned and are silent in the presence of strangers. The most precious contribution to our literature from such a, source is _The Bard of the Dimbovitza_, an English translation of folk-songs and ballads peculiar to a certain district of Roumania. They were gathered by a native gentlewoman from among the peasants on her father's estate. "She was forced," writes Carmen Sylva, Queen of Roumania, one of the two translators, "to affect a desire to learn spinning, that she might join the girls at their spinning parties, and so overhear their songs more easily; she hid in the tall maize to hear the reapers crooning them, ... she listened for them by death-beds, by cradles, at the dance, and in the tavern, with inexhaustible patience.... Most of them are improvisations. They usually begin and end with a refrain." The Celtic revival, too, is discovering not only the love of song, but, to some extent, the power of improvisation in the more remote corners of the British Isles. Instances of popular balladry in the west of Ireland are givrn by Lady Gregory in her _Poets and Dreamers._ The Roumanians still have their lute-players; old people in Galway still remember the last of their wandering folk-bards; but the Ettrick Shepherd, a century ago, had to call upon imagination for the picture of "Each Caledonian minstrel true, Dressed in his plaid and bonnet blue, With harp across his shoulders slung, And music murmuring round his tongue."