Note 53 — 272

A portion (or portions) of a Low German tale of this class, the verses and a little more, was the basis of Bürger’s ‘Lenore,’ composed in 1773. (As to the particulars of the traditional basis, Erich Schmidt seems to me undoubtedly right: Charakteristiken, p. 219 f.) At the end of the last century, when ‘Lenore’ became well known in England through half a dozen translations, it was maintained that Bürger had taken the idea of his ballad from ‘The Suffolk Miracle,’ with which he was supposed to have become acquainted through the copy in Old Ballads, 1723. See The Monthly Magazine, 1796, II, 603. But it is nearly certain that Bürger had not seen, and never saw, the “Old Ballads” of 1723. In 1777 Boie made him acquainted with a book of that title, but this was in all probability Evans’s first collection, which appeared in that year. See Strodtmann, Briefe von und an G. A. Bürger, II, 85, 87. Bürger knew ‘Sweet William’s Ghost’ from Percy’s Reliques, and took a hint or two from that, besides the lover’s name.