Furthermore, the ballad is not the ballade. The ballade is a highly artificial form of verse, French in origin, consisting, as a rule, of three eight-line stanzas and a four-line envoi, with only three rhymes in all twenty-eight lines. People with a taste for untra-modern spelling sometimes label these productions "ballads" instead of "ballades," and other people sometimes try to give their ballads an archaic flavor by labeling them "ballades." Both practices are utterly unjustifiable. A ballade is no more a ballad than a sonnet is a quatrain. What, then, is a ballad? In "On the History of the Ballads, 1100-1500" (Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume IV), Professor W. P. Ker writes: "The truth is that the ballad is an ideal, a poetical form, which can take up any matter, and does not leave that matter as it was before." But this, of course, is no definition. It would apply equally well to all forms of poetry. Professor Ker continues: "In spite of Socrates and his logic we may venture to say, in answer to the question 'What is a ballad?'--'A Ballad is "The Milldams of Binnorie" and "Sir Patrick Spens" and "The Douglas Tragedy" and "Lord Randal" and "Childe Maurice," and things of that sort.'" That greatest of anthologists, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, quotes these remarks of Professor Ker in the preface to his volume "The Oxford Book of Ballads," a book which every lover of poetry and especially every member of the craft of verse-making should possess. He goes on to supplement Professor Ker's definition, or rather description, by quoting lines from a number of famous ballads of ancient days, and saying that the ballad is these things also and in proof of the statement that ballads are diverse in manner and theme he mentions as latter-day ballad-makers poets having so little in common as Sir Walter Scott, Coleridge and Rudyard Kipling. Thus do Professor Ker and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch evade the task of definition-making. But they are critics of poetry and therefore entitled to the use of escapes and evasions denied to the author of a text-book. Let me therefore say with no thought of originality in the saying, that a ballad is a story told in verse. Usually it is told in a sequence of quatrains, with one rhyme to a stanza, and usually the line is the iambic heptameter--or rather the stanza consists of two iambic tetrameters and two iambic trimeters. But this form is not inevitable; the only thing inevitable about a ballad is that it shall be a story. Of the ancient ballads there are many collections, of which the most famous are those of Bishop Percy and of Professor Child. But Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's book, already mentioned, is sufficiently comprehensive for the needs of the ordinary student of the subject.