The delay in the publication of this Ninth Part of the English and Scottish Ballads has been occasioned partly by disturbances of health, but principally by the necessity of waiting for texts.

Advertisement to Part IX, numbers 266-305, April 1894.

For texts, information, or correction of errors, I have the pleasure of expressing my indebtedness to the following gentlemen in Europe: Mr Andrew Lang; Mr J. K. Hudson of Manchester; Professor J. Estlin Carpenter of Oxford; Messrs W. Macmath and David MacRitchie of Edinburgh; Mr W. Walker of Aberdeen; Dr Axel Olrik of Copenhagen; and in America to the following ladies and gentlemen: Miss Mary C. Burleigh of Massachusetts; Miss Louise Porter Haskell of South Carolina; Professor Kittredge, Dr W. H. Schofield, Dr W. P. Few and Mr E. E. Griffith of Harvard College; Professor W. U. Richardson of the Harvard Medical School; Dr F. A. Morrison of Indiana; and Mr W. W. Newell, editor of the Journal of American Folk-Lore.

Advertisement to Part X, January 1898.

Leyden (1801) says that he had "heard the whole song when very young."

[Ballad] 266. John Thomson and the Turk.

John Thomson fought against the Turks
Three years into a far country,
And all that time, and something more,
Was absent from his gay lady.

[Ballad 266. John Thomson and the Turk]. A.

In the course of his insistence upon the necessity of a continued recognition of the popular ballad as a distinct literary type, Professor Gummere points out the value of a collection of Professor Child's critical remarks on the ballad and an attempt to determine their general drift.

Professor Child and the ballad, by Walter Morris Hart.