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 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.