While Rossetti and Jean Ingelow and others have rather favored the inconsequential burden, an affectation travestied by the late Mr. C. S. Calverley: 

    “The auld wife sat at her ivied door,
      (Butter and eggs and a pound of cheese)
    A thing she had frequently done before;
      And her spectacles lay on her aproned knees.

    “The 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, and others, along with the