[ Footnotes]
[1.] For the subject of the origin of the ballad and its refrain in the ballatio of the dancing-ring, see The Beginnings of Poetry, by Professor Francis B. Gummere, especially chap. v. The beginning of the whole subject is to be found in the universal and innate practices of accompanying manual or bodily labour by a rhythmic chant or song, and of festal song and dance.
[2.] See the first essay, ‘What is “Popular Poetry”?’ in Ideas of Good and Evil, by W. B. Yeats (1903), where this distinction is not recognised.
[3.] Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard (see p. 19, etc.).
[4.] ‘The truth really lay between the two, for neither appreciated the wide variety covered by a common name’ (The Mediæval Stage, E. K. Chambers, 1903). See especially chapters iii. and iv. of this work for an admirably complete and illuminating account of minstrelsy.
[5.] For the most recent discussions, see Bibliography, p. lii.
[6.] But these were only re-enactments of existing laws. See Chambers, Mediæval Stage, i. p. 54.
[7.] A good notion of the way in which the old ballads plunge in medias res may be obtained by reading the Index of First Lines.
[8.] Unless we may attribute that distinction to the blind Irish bard Raftery, who flourished sixty years ago. See various accounts of him given by Lady Gregory (Poets and Dreamers) and W. B. Yeats (The Celtic Twilight, 1902). But he appears to have been more of an improviser than a reciter.
[9.] ‘He [Coleridge] said the Lyrical Ballads were an experiment about to be tried by him and Wordsworth, to see how far the public taste would endure poetry written in a more natural and simple style than had hitherto been attempted; totally discarding the artifices of poetical diction, and making use only of such words as had probably been common in the most ordinary language since the days of Henry II.’—Hazlitt.