furnishes good instances
of this progressive iteration. Moreover, the ballad differs from earlier
English epics in that it invariably has stanzas and rhyme; of the two
forms of stanza, the two-line stanza with a refrain is probably older
than the stanza with four or six lines.

This necessary quality of the stanza points to the origin of the ballad
in song; but longer ballads, such as those that make up the 'Gest of
Robin Hood,' an epic in little, were not sung as lyrics or to aid the
dance, but were either chanted in a monotonous fashion or else recited
outright. Chappell, in his admirable work on old English music ('Music
of the Olden Time,' ii. 790), names a third class of "characteristic
airs of England,"--the "historical and very long ballads, ... invariably
of simple construction, usually plaintive.... They were rarely if ever
used for dancing." Most of the longer ballads, however, were doubtless
given by one person in a sort of recitative; this is the case with
modern ballads of Russia and Servia, where the bystanders now and then
join in a chorus. Precisely in the same way ballads were divorced from
the dance, originally their vital condition; but in the refrain, which
is attached to so many ballads, one finds an element which has survived
from those earliest days of communal song.

Of oldest communal poetry no actual ballad has come down to us. Hints
and even fragments, however, are pointed out in ancient records, mainly
as the material of chronicle or legend. In the Bible (Numbers xxi. 17),
where "Israel sang this song," we are not going too far when we regard
the fragment as part of a communal ballad. "Spring up, O well: sing ye
unto it: the princes digged the well, the nobles of the people digged
it, by the direction of the lawgiver, with their staves." Deborah's song
has something of the communal note; and when Miriam dances and sings
with her maidens, one is reminded of the many ballads made by dancing
and singing bands of women in mediaeval Europe,--for instance, the song
made in the seventh century to the honor of St. Faro, and "sung by the
women as they danced and clapped their hands." The question of ancient
Greek ballads, and their relation to the epic, is not to be discussed
here; nor can we make more than an allusion to the theory of Niebuhr
that the early part of Livy is founded on, old Roman ballads. A popular
discussion of this matter may be found in Macaulay's preface to his own
'Lays of Ancien