ressant pour un esprit serieux?'--Cosquin.

The old ballads of England and Scotland are fine wine in cobwebbed
bottles; and many have made the error of paying too much attention to
the cobwebs and not enough attention to the wine. This error is as
blameworthy as its converse: we must take the inside and the outside
together.

+I. What is a Ballad?+

The earliest sense of the word 'ballad,' or rather of its French and
Provencal predecessors, _balada_, _balade_ (derived from the late Latin
_ballare_, to dance), was 'a song intended as the accompaniment to a
dance,' a sense long obsolete.[1] Next came the meaning, a simple song
of sentiment or romance, of two verses or more, each of which is sung to
the same air, the accompaniment being subordinate to the melody. This
sense we still use in our 'ballad-concerts.' Another meaning was that of
simply a popular song or ditty of the day, lyrical or narrative, of the
kind often printed as a broadsheet. Lyrical _or_ narrative, because the
Elizabethans appear not to distinguish the two. Read, for instance, the
well-known scene in _The Winter's Tale_ (Act IV. Sc. 4); here we have
both the lyrical ballad, as sung by Dorcas and Mopsa, in which Autolycus
bears his part 'because it is his occupation'; and also the 'ballad in
print,' which Mopsa says she loves--'for then we are sure it is true.'
Immediately after, however, we discover that the 'ballad in print' is
the broadside, the narrative ballad, sung of a usurer's wife brought to
bed of twenty money-bags at a burden, or of a fish that appeared upon
the coast on Wednesday the fourscore of April: in short, as _Martin
Mar-sixtus_ says (1592), 'scarce a cat can look out of a gutter but out
starts a halfpenny chronicler, and presently a proper new ballet of a
strange sight is indited.' Chief amongst these 'halfpenny chroniclers'
were William Elderton, of whom Camden records that he 'did arm himself
with ale (as old father Ennius did with wine) when he ballated,' and
thereby obtained a red nose almost as celebrated as his verses; Thomas
Deloney, 'the ballating silkweaver of Norwich'; and Richard Johnson,
maker of Garlands. Thus to Milton, to Addison, and even to Johnson,
'ballad' essentially implies singing; but from about the middle of the
eighteenth century the modern interpretation of the word began to come
into general use.

[Footnote 1: For the subject of the origin of the ballad and its
refrain in the _ballatio_ of the d