Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/28

xxii xxii INTRODUCTION. in that day exclusively for the dance, but any lively ballad served the turn. Greater dignity than of the broadsides now and then invested the ballad, as when Puttenham speaks of the classical lyric poets writing "songs or ballads of pleasure," or calls the encomia " ballads of praise," mentioning, too, the " ballade of birth " — for a prince — and the song at nuptials " done in ballade wise." * This, however, is the academic use of a term commonly felt to be an affair of the street or roadside, and distinctly opposed to loftier efforts of both music and poetry.^ Among many causes for this low estate of the ballad must doubtless be reckoned the scurrilous attacks on people or institutions, which were printed as broadsides, and often to a popular tune ; here we are not so far, except in a metrical way, from the ballade of Villon and the ballet of Dunbar. Thocht I in ballet did with him baurde, says the latter in his palinode about James Doig; indeed, Dunbar's frequently complicated arrangement of the stanza, and a recurring refrain, suggest models far removed from the verses of that later rout whom Shakspere knew, the "scald rhymers" who balladed out o* tune."'' 1 Arber*s Reprint of Puttenham *s Arte of English Poesie^ pp. 40, 58, 64 ff. Of love-lyrics Puttenham names (p. 60) " odes, songs, elegies, ballads, sonets, and other ditties." In another place (p. 72) he mentions " enterlude, song, ballade, carroU, and ditty," as common names for " our vulgar makings." He himself had made a " brief Romance or historicall ditty in the English tong of the Isle of great Britaine in short and long meetres, and by breaches or divisions to be more commodiously song to the harpe. . . " (p. 57). 2 " Musicians held ballads in contempt, and great poets rarely wrote in ballad metre." — Chappell, I, 105. ^ Of course, Dunbar knows the other signification of ballad as an amorous Ijrric. See the Thva Mariit Wemen^ 480 ; Targe^ 103 (" ballettis in love " ) ; and his complaint of winter as unfavorable to Digitized by LjOOQIC