and others, along
with the virelay, rondeau, triolet, etc. There is also a numerous class
of popular ballads--in the sense of something made _for_ the people,
though not _by_ the people--are without relation to our subject. These
are the street ballads, which were and still are hawked about by
ballad-mongers, and which have no literary character whatever. There are
satirical and political ballads, ballads versifying passages in Scripture
or chronicle, ballads relating to current events, or giving the history
of famous murders and other crimes, of prodigies, providences, and all
sorts of happenings that teach a lesson in morals: about George Barnwell
and the "Babes in the Wood," and "Whittington and his Cat," etc.: ballads
like Shenstone's "Jemmy Dawson" and Gay's "Black-eyed Susan." Thousands
of such are included in manuscript collections like the "Pepysian," or
printed in the publications of the Roxburghe Club and the Ballad Society.
But whether entirely modern, or extant in black-letter broadsides, they
are nothing to our purpose. We have to do here with the folk-song, the
_traditional_ ballad, product of the people at a time when the people was
homogeneous and the separation between the lettered and unlettered
classes had not yet taken place: the true minstrel ballad of the Middle
Ages, or of that state of society which in rude and primitive
neighborhoods, like the Scottish border, prolonged mediaeval conditions
beyond the strictly mediaeval period.

In the form in which they are preserved, a few of our ballads are older
than the seventeenth or the latter part of the sixteenth century, though
in their origin many of them are much older. Manuscript versions of
"Robin Hood and the Monk" and "Robin Hood and the Potter" exist, which
are referred to the last years of the fifteenth century. The "Lytel
Geste of Robyn Hode" was printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1489. The
"Not-Brown Maid" was printed in "Arnold's Chronicle" in 1502. "The
Hunting of the Cheviot"--the elder version of "Chevy Chase"--was
mentioned by Philip Sidney in his "Defence of Poesie" in 1850.[8] The
ballad is a narrative song, naive, impersonal, spontaneous, objective.
The singer is lost in the song, the teller in the tale. That is its
essence, but sometimes the story is told by the lyrical, sometimes by the
dramatic method. In "Helen of Kirkconnell" it is the bereaved lover who
is himself the speaker: in "Waly Waly," the forsaken maid. These are