English ballads, as we have them in print to-day, took form in a far later and more sophisticated period than those just suggested; yet even thus our ballads stand nearest of anything in our literature to the primitive poetry that was born out of the social life of the community rather than made by the solitary thought of the artist. Even so comparatively small a group as that comprehended within this volume shows how truly the ballad is the parent stock of all other poetic varieties. In the ballad of plain narrative, as _The Hunting of the Cheviot,_ the epic is hinted. We go a step further in _A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode,_--too long for insertion in this collection, but peculiarly interesting from the antiquarian point of view, having been printed, in part, as early as 1489,--and find at least a rough foundation for a genuine hero-lay, the _Lytell Geste_ being made up of a number of ballads rudely woven into one. A poem like this, though hardly "an epic in miniature,"--a phrase which has been proposed as the definition of a ballad,--is truly an epic in germ, lacking the finish of a miniature, but holding the promise of a seed. Where the narrative is highly colored by emotion, as in _Helen of Kirconnell_ or _Waly Waly,_ the ballad merges into the lyric. It is difficult here to draw the line of distinction. _A Lyke-Wake Dirge_ is almost purely lyric in quality, while _The Lawlands o' Holland, Gilderoy, The Twa Corbies, Bonny Barbara Allan,_ have each a pronounced lyric element. From the ballad of dialogue we look forward to the drama, not only from the ballad of pure dialogue, as _Lord Ronald,_ or _Edward, Edward,_ or that sweet old English folk-song, too long for insertion here, _The Not-Browne Mayd,_ but more remotely from the ballad of mingled dialogue and narrative, as _The Gardener or Fine Flowers i' the Valley._ The beginnings of English balladry are far out of sight. From the date when the race first had deeds to praise and words with which to praise them, it is all but certain that ballads were in the air. But even the mediteval ballads are lost to us. It was the written literature, the work of clerks, fixed upon the parchment, that survived, while the songs of the people, passing from lip to lip down the generations, continually reshaped themselves to the changing times. But they were never hushed. While Chaucer, his genius fed by Norman and Italian streams, was making the fourteenth century reecho with that laughter which "comes never to an end" of the Canterbury story-tellers; while Langland, even his Teutonic spirit swayed by French example, was brooding the gloomy _Vision of Piers the Plowman,_--gloom with a star at its centre; while those "courtly makers," Wyatt and Surrey, were smoothing English song, which in the hands of Skelton had become so "Tatter'd and jagged, Rudely raine-beaten, Rusty and moth-eaten,"