"La ballade asservie à ses vieilles maximes,
Souvent doit tout son lustre au caprice des rimes,"
the ballade went entirely out of fashion for two hundred years, when it was resuscitated in the middle of the 19th century by Théodore de Banville, who published in 1873 a volume of Trente-six ballades joyeuses, which has found many imitators. The ballade, a typically French form, has been extensively employed in no other language, except in English. In the 15th and 16th centuries many ballades were written, with more or less close attention to the French rules, by the leading English poets, and in particular by Chaucer, by Gower (whose surviving ballades, however, are all in French) and by Lydgate. An example from Chaucer will show that the type of strophe and rhyme arrangement was in medieval English:—
"Madamë, ye been of all beauty shrine
As far as circled is the mappëmound;
For, as the crystal, glorious ye shine,
And likë ruby been your cheekës round.
Therewith ye been so merry and so jocúnd
That at a revel when that I see you dance,
It is an oinëment unto my wound,