This is the trochaic rhythm dear to the common people of Rome and the
near provinces, who as every one knows spoke a very different speech
from the speech of the patrician, and sang their own songs withal; a
few specimens of the latter, notably the soldiers' song about Caesar,
have come down to us.[11]

[11] We cannot widen our borders so as to include that
solitary folk-song rescued from ancient Greek literature, the
'Song of the Swallow,' sung by children of the Island of
Rhodes as they went about asking gifts from house to house at
the coming of the earliest swallow. The metre is interesting
in comparison with the rhythm of later European folk-songs,
and there is evident dramatic action. Nor can we include the
fragments of communal drama found in the favorite Debates
Between Summer and Winter,--from the actual contest, to such
lyrical forms as the song at the end of Shakespeare's 'Love's
Labor's Lost.' The reader may be reminded of a good specimen
of this class in 'Ivy and Holly,' printed by Ritson, 'Ancient
Songs and Ballads,' Hazlitt's edition, page 114 ff., with the
refrain:--

Nay, Ivy, nay,
Hyt shal not be, I wys;
Let Holy hafe the maystry,
As the maner ys.

The refrain itself, of whatever metre, was imitated by classical poets
like Catullus; and the earliest traditions of Greece tell of these
refrains, with gathering verses of lyric or narrative character, sung
in the harvest-field and at the dance. In early Assyrian poetry, even,
the refrain plays an important part; while an Egyptian folk-song, sung
by the reapers, seems to have been little else than a refrain. Towards
the end of the Middle Ages, courtly poets took up the refrain,
experimented with it, refined it, and so developed those highly
artificial forms of verse known as roundel, triolet, and ballade. The
refrain, in short, is corner-stone for all poetry of the people, if
not of poetry itself; beginning with inarticulate cries of joy or
sorrow, like the _eya_ noted above, mere emotional utterances or
imitations of various sounds, then growing in distinctness and
compass, until the separation of choral from artistic poetry, and the
increasing importance of the latter, reduced the refrain to a merely
ancillary function, and finally did away with it altogether. Many
refrains are still used for the dance which are mere exclamations,
with just enough coherence of wo