eres, Sarrazin, Voiture and La Fontaine.
Attacked by Moliere, and by Boileau, who wrote

"La ballade asservie a ses vieilles maximes,
Souvent doit tout son lustre au caprice des rimes,"

the ballade went entirely out of fashion for two hundred years, when it was
resuscitated in the middle of the 19th century by Theodore de Banville, who
published in 1873 a volume of _Trente-six ballades joyeuses_, which has
found many imitators. The ballade, a typically French form, has been
extensively employed in no other language, except in English. In the 15th
and 16th centuries many ballades were written, with more or less close
attention to the French rules, by the leading English poets, and in
particular by Chaucer, by Gower (whose surviving ballades, however, are all
in French) and by Lydgate. An example from Chaucer will show that the type
of strophe and rhyme arrangement was in medieval English:--

"Madame, ye been of all beauty shrine
As far as circled is the mappemound;
For, as the crystal, glorious ye shine,
And like ruby been your cheekes round.
Therewith ye been so merry and so jocund
That at a revel when that I see you dance,
It is an oinement unto my wound,
Though ye to me ne do no daliance.

"For though I weep of teares full a tine [cask],
Yet may that woe my hearte not confound;
Your seemly voice, that ye so small out-twine,
Maketh my thought in joy and bliss abound.
So courteously I go, with love bound,
That to myself I say, in my penance,
Sufficeth me to love you, Rosamound,
Though ye to me ne do no daliance.

"Was never pike wallowed in galantine,
As I in love am wallowed and y-wound;
For which full oft I of myself divine
That I am true Tristram the second.
My love may not refrayed [cooled down] be nor afound [foundered];
I burn ay in an amorous pleasance.
Do what you list, I will your thrall be found,
Though ye to me ne do no daliance."

The absence of an envoi will be noticed in Chaucer's, as in most of the
medieval English ballades. This points to a relation with the earliest
French form, in its imperfect condition, rather than with that which
afterwards became accepted. But a ballade without an envoi lacks that
section whose function is to tie together the rest, and complete the whole
as a work of art. After the 16th century original ballades were no more
written in English until the latter part of the 19th, when they were
re-