CHAPTER VIII.
THACKERAY'S BALLADS.
We have a volume of Thackeray's poems, republished under the name of _Ballads_, which is, I think, to a great extent a misnomer.

They are all readable, almost all good, full of humour, and with some fine touches of pathos, most happy in their versification, and, with a few exceptions, hitting well on the head the nail which he intended to hit.

But they are not on that account ballads.

Literally, a ballad is a song, but it has come to signify a short chronicle in verse, which may be political, or pathetic, or grotesque,--or it may have all three characteristics or any two of them; but not on that account is any grotesque poem a ballad,--nor, of course, any pathetic or any political poem.

_Jacob Omnium's Hoss_ may fairly be called a ballad, containing as it does a chronicle of a certain well-defined transaction; and the story of _King Canute_ is a ballad,--one of the best that has been produced in our language in modern years.