"3 For each edited ballad, Swinburne seems to have studied multiple different versions earlier published by ballad scholars from Bishop Thomas Percy (1765) to Scott and his successors in the nineteenth century, especially William Jamieson (1806), William Motherwell (1827), George R. Kinlock (1827), Peter Buchan (1828), and, most recently, the American scholar of early English literature Frances James Child, the second edition of whose initial collection of English and Scottish ballads, in eight small volumes, had just been published in London.4 Unlike his larger and better-known later collection of 1882-1898, Child's initial publication was part of a series intended to cover the whole history of English poetry; by including ballads and songs he extended that history from literary to popular traditions. Nor was the traffic simply one-way: poems by major poets, including Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and Robert Herrick, enjoyed an extensive popular life through broadsides or song sheets and were performed in homes, streets, and theaters (often without the name of the author attached).\n (ll. 5-8, p. 147)24 Lady Wariston's spoken comments draw attention to the perilously thin line between song and life-between what the ballad narrates and what, in her own tormented state, she might do to the fascinated, frightened children to whom she sings: "Then she killed them, Ethel, both, and put their blood in a little brass dish . . . in some pot or pan, with the blood of a little white chicken, like you . .