The _ballade_ was an old French form of verse, in France revived by Théodore de Banville, and restored to an England which had long forgotten the Middle Ages, by my friends Mr. Austin Dobson and Mr. Edmund Gosse. They, so far as I can trust my memory, were the first to reintroduce these pleasant old French _nugae_, while an anonymous author let loose upon the town a whole winged flock of _ballades_ of amazing dexterity. This unknown balladist was Mr. Henley; perhaps he was the first Englishman who ever burst into a _double ballade_, and his translations of two of Villon’s ballades into modern thieves’ slang were marvels of dexterity. Mr. Swinburne wrote a serious _ballade_, but the form, I venture to think, is not ‘wholly serious,’ of its nature, in modern days; and he did not persevere. Nor did the taste for these trifles long endure. A good _ballade_ is almost as rare as a good sonnet, but a middling _ballade_ is almost as easily written as the majority of sonnets. Either form readily becomes mechanical, cheap and facile. I have heard Mr. George Meredith improvise a sonnet, a Petrarchian sonnet, obedient to the rules, without pen and paper. He spoke ‘and the numbers came’; he sonneted as easily as a living poet, in his Eton days, improvised Latin elegiacs and Greek hexameters. The sonnet endures. Mr. Horace Hutchinson wrote somewhere: “When you have read a sonnet, you feel that though there does not seem to be much of it, you have done a good deal, as when you have eaten a cold hard-boiled egg.” Still people keep on writing sonnets, because the sonnet is wholly serious. In an English sonnet you cannot easily be flippant of pen. A few great poets have written immortal sonnets—among them are Milton, Wordsworth, and Keats. Thus the sonnet is a thing which every poet thinks it worth while to try at; like Felix Arvers, he may be made immortal by a single sonnet. Even I have written one too many! Every anthologist wants to anthologise it (_The Odyssey_); it never was a favourite of my own, though it had the honour to be kindly spoken of by Mr. Matthew Arnold. On the other hand, no man since François Villon has been immortalised by a single ballade—_Mais où sont les neiges d’antan_? To speak in any detail about these poor ballades would be to indite a part of an autobiography. Looking back at the little book, ‘what memories it stirs’ in one to whom ‘Fate has done this wrong, That I should write too much and live too long.’ _The Ballade of the Tweed_, and the _Rhymes à la Mode_, were dedicated to the dearest of kinsmen, a cricketer and angler. The _Ballade of Roulette_ was inscribed to R. R., a gallant veteran of the Indian Mutiny, a leader of Light Horse, whose father was a friend of Sir Walter Scott. He was himself a Borderer, in whose defeats on the green field of Roulette I often shared, long, long ago.