| Sumario: | The Child ballad 'Fair Margaret and Sweet William' (Child 74) can supposedly be traced back to an echo in a play of the first decade of the seventeenth century, and yet there is no acaial trace of the ballad until a broadside of c.1720. At that time, there also start to appear various copies of another ballad, generally known as 'William and Margaret', which tells a similar story but in a more 'literary' style. This has been widely, but inconclusively, attributed to the Anglo-Scots poet and playwright David Mallet (formerly Malloch) (1701/2?--65). The present article traces the parallel paths taken by the two ballads, reviews the claims about authorship, and considers their contrasting styles, with a view to a reassessment of what the 'ballad' might have meant to the eighteenth century.
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