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 monologues; for a purely dialogue ballad it will be sufficient to mention the power and impressive piece in the “Reliques” entitled “Edward.”  Herder translated this into German; it is very old, with Danish, Swedish, and Finnish analogues.  It is a story of parricide, and is narrated in a series of questions by the mother and answers by the son.  The commonest form, however, was a mixture of epic and dramatic, or direct relation with dialogue.  A frequent feature is the abruptness of the opening and the translations.  The ballad-maker observes unconsciously Aristotle’s rule for the epic poet, to begin in medias res.  Johnson noticed this in the instance of “Johnny Armstrong,” but a stronger example is found in “The Banks of Yarrow:”