Chevy Chase

…his enthusiastic account of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature and…

…late broadside version called “Chevy Chase.” The details in historical ballads are usually incorrect as to fact because of faulty memory or partisan alterations, but they are valuable in reflecting folk attitudes toward the events they imperfectly report. For example, neither “The Death of Queen Jane,” about one of…