Quiller-Couch

Photograph: Nam Y Huh/AP Fiction writers often like a principle espoused by the late British author Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch: kill your darlings.

But if you want to grow, as the great British journalist Arthur Quiller-Couch once said, it may be time to "murder your darlings."

The ballads that follow have all been selected from The Oxford Book of Ballads, edited by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.

When On the Art of Writing, by Arthur Quiller-Couch, appeared we followed Hazlitt's advice and reread an old book, English Composition, by Professor Barrett Wendell, and with more pleasure and profit than followed the later perusal of the Cornish novelist's lectures.

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch put his "The Starlight Night" in the "Oxford Book of Victorian Verse," and he is represented in Orby Shipley's "Carmina Mariana" and H. C. Beeching's "Lyra Sacra."