t Rome.' The ballads of modern Europe are a survival of
older communal poetry, more or less influenced by artistic and
individual conditions of authorship, but wholly impersonal, and with an
appeal to our interest which seems to come from a throng and not from
the solitary poet. Attention was early called to the ballads of Spain;
printed at first as broadsides, they were gathered into a volume as
early as 1550. On the other hand, ballads were neglected in France until
very recent times; for specimens of the French ballad, and for an
account of it, the reader should consult Professor Crane's 'Chansons
Populaires de France,' New York, 1891. It is with ballads of the
Germanic race, however, that we are now concerned. Denmark, Norway,
Sweden, Iceland, the Faroe Islands; Scotland and England; the
Netherlands and Germany: all of these countries offer us admirable
specimens of the ballad. Particularly, the great collections of
Grundtvig ('Danmarks Gamle Folkeviser') for Denmark, and of Child ('The
English and Scottish Popular Ballads') for our own tongue, show how
common descent or borrowing connects the individual ballads of these
groups. "Almost every Norwegian, Swedish, or Icelandic ballad," says
Grundtvig, "is found in a Danish version of Scandinavian ballads;
moreover, a larger number can be found in English and Scottish versions
than in German or Dutch versions." Again, we find certain national
preferences in the character of the ballads which have come down to us.
Scandinavia kept the old heroic lays (Kaempeviser); Germany wove them
into her epic, as witness the Nibelungen Lay; but England and Scotland
have none of them in any shape. So, too, the mythic ballad, scantily
represented in English, and practically unknown in Germany, abounds in
Scandinavian collections. The Faroe Islands and Norway, as Grundtvig
tells us, show the best record for ballads preserved by oral tradition;
while noble ladies of Denmark, three or four centuries ago, did high
service to ballad literature by making collections in manuscript of the
songs current then in the castle as in the cottage.

For England, one is compelled to begin the list of known ballads with
the thirteenth century. 'The Battle of Maldon,' composed in the last
decade of the tenth century, though spirited enough and full of communal
vigor, has no stanzaic structure, follows in metre and style the rules
of the Old English epic, and is only a ballad by courtesy; about the
ballad