e farmer's daughter hath soft brown hair
(Butter and eggs and a pound of cheese),
And I met with a ballad, I can't say where,
Which wholly consisted of lines like these."[6]

A musical or mnemonic device akin to the refrain was that sing-song
species of repetend so familiar in ballad language:

"She had na pu'd a double rose,
a rose but only twa."

"They had na sailed a league, a league,
A league but barely three.

"How will I come up? How can I come up?
How can I come to thee?"

An answer is usually returned in the identical words of the question; and
as in Homer, a formula of narration or a commonplace of description does
duty again and again. Iteration in the ballads is not merely for
economy, but stands in lieu of the metaphor and other figures of literary
poetry:

"'O Marie, put on your robes o' black,
Or else your robes o' brown,
For ye maun gang wi' me the night,
To see fair Edinbro town.'

"'I winna put on my robes o' black,
Nor yet my robes o' brown;
But I'll put on my robes o' white,
To shine through Edinbro town.'"

Another mark of the genuine ballad manner, as of Homer and _Volkspoesie_
in general, is the conventional epithet. Macaulay noted that the gold is
always red in the ballads, the ladies always gay, and Robin Hood's men
are always his merry men. Doughty Douglas, bold Robin Hood, merry
Carlisle, the good greenwood, the gray goose wing, and the wan water are
other inseparables of the kind. Still another mark is the frequent
retention of the Middle English accent on the final syllable in words
like contrie, baron, dinere, felawe, abbay, rivere, money, and its
assumption by words which never properly had it, such as lady, harper,
wedding, water, etc.[7] Indeed, as Percy pointed out in his
introduction, there were "many phrases and idioms which the minstrels
seem to have appropriated to themselves, . . . a cast of style and
measure very different from that of contemporary poets of a higher class."

Not everything that is called a ballad belongs to the class of poetry
that we are here considering. In its looser employment the word has
signified almost any kind of song: "a woeful ballad made to his mistress'
eyebrow," for example. "Ballade" was also the name of a somewhat
intricate French stanza form, employed by Gower and Chaucer, and recently
reintroduced into English verse by Dobson, Lang, Goose,