Balfour, while the Scotch have "they lived happy
and died happy, and never drank out of a dry cappie."
In the course of the tale the chief thing to be noticed is the
occurrence of rhymes in the prose narrative, tending to give the
appearance of a _cante-fable_. I have enumerated those occurring in
_English Fairy Tales_ in the notes to _Childe Rowland_ (No. xxi.). In
the present volume, rhyme occurs in Nos. xlvi., xlviii., xlix., lviii.,
lx., lxiii. (see Note), lxiv., lxxiv., lxxxi., lxxxv., while lv., lxix.,
lxxiii., lxxvi., lxxxiii., lxxxiv., are either in verse themselves or
derived from verse versions. Altogether one third of our collection
gives evidence in favour of the _cante-fable_ theory which I adduced in
my notes to _Childe Rowland_. Another point of interest in English
folk-narrative is the repetition of verbs of motion, "So he went along
and went along and went along." Still more curious is a frequent change
of tense from the English present to the past. "So he gets up and went
along.
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