Ball, Game of. Ball-playing was practised by the ancients, and old and young amused themselves with it. The Phæacian damsels are represented in the Odyssey as playing it to the sound of music; and Horace represents Mæcenas as amusing himself thus during a journey. In the Greek gymnasia, the Roman baths, and in many Roman villas, a sphæristerium (a place appropriated for playing ball) was to be found; the games played being similar to those of the present day. In the Middle Ages the sport continued to be very popular both as an indoor and outdoor exercise, and was a favourite Court pastime until about the end of the eighteenth century. In England football and tennis are mentioned at an early date, and a favourite game prior to the English revolution was one in which a mall or mallet was used, hence the name pall-mall (It. palla, Lat. pila, a ball) for the game and the place where it was played. The most popular modern forms are cricket, base-ball, football, golf, lawn-tennis, fives, and polo.
Ball, John, an itinerant preacher of the fourteenth century, excommunicated about 1367 for promulgating "errors, schisms, and scandals against the Pope, archbishops, bishops, and clergy". He was one of the most active promoters of the popular insurgent spirit which found vent under Wat Tyler in 1381, and the couplet
"When Adam delved and Eve span
Who was then the gentleman?"
is attributed to him. He was hanged, drawn, and quartered on 15th July, 1381.
Ball, Sir Robert Stawell, astronomer, born at Dublin 1840, educated at Chester and Trinity College, Dublin. In 1865 he was appointed Lord Rosse's astronomer at Parsonstown, and subsequently held various official posts, including those of Andrews professor of astronomy in the University of Dublin and Astronomer Royal for Ireland (1874), Lowndean professor of astronomy and geometry in the University of Cambridge and director of the observatory (1892). He became F.R.S. in 1873, and was knighted in 1886. Besides many memoirs and articles, he published The Story of the Heavens, Starland, In Starry Realms, Time and Tide, The Story of the Sun, Great Astronomers, The Earth's Beginning, Popular Guide to the Heavens (numerous plates with
accompanying text), Natural Sources of Power, &c. He died in 1913.
Bal´lad, a term loosely applied to various poetic forms of the song type, but in its most definite sense a poem in which a short narrative is subjected to simple lyrical treatment. It was, as indicated by its name, which is related to the Low Latin ballare and O. French baller, to dance, originally a song accompanied by a dance. The ballad, like the nursery tales and the Märchen, is probably one of the earliest forms of rhythmic poetic expression, constituting a species of epic in miniature, out of which by fusion and remoulding larger epics were sometimes shaped. Their present form is, of course, relatively recent. As in the folk-tales, so in the ballads of different nations, the resemblances are sufficiently numerous and close to point to the conclusion that they have often had their first origin in the same primitive folk-lore or popular tales. But in any case, excepting a few modern literary ballads of a subtler kind, they have been the popular expression of the broad human emotions clustering about some strongly-outlined incidents of war, love, crime, superstition, or death. It is probable that in the Homeric poems fragments of older ballads are embedded; but the earliest ballads, properly so called, of which we have record were the ballistea or dancing-songs of the Romans, of the kind sung in honour of the deeds of Aurelian in the Sarmatic war by a chorus of dancing boys. In their less specialized sense of lyric narratives, their early popularity among the Teutonic race is evidenced by the testimony of Tacitus, of the Gothic historian Jornandes, and the Lombard historian Paulus Diaconus; and many appear to have been written down by order of Charlemagne and used as a means of education. Of the ballads of this period, however, only a general conception can be formed from their traces in conglomerates like the Niebelungenlied; the more artificial productions of the Minnesingers and Meistersingers overlying the more popular ballad until the fifteenth century, when it sprang once more into vigorous life. A third German ballad period was initiated by Bürger, under the inspiration of the revived interest in the subject shown in Great Britain and the publication of the Percy Reliques; and the movement was sustained by Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Heine, Uhland, and others. The earlier German work is, however, of inferior value to that of Scandinavia, where, though comparatively few manuscripts have survived, and those not more than three or four centuries old, a more perfect oral tradition has rendered it possible to trace the original stock of the twelfth century.
Of the English and Scottish ballads anterior to the thirteenth century there are few traces beyond the indication that they were abundant, if indeed anything can be definitely asserted of them earlier than the fourteenth century. Among the oldest may be placed The Little Gest of Robin Hood, Hugh of Lincoln, Sir Patrick Spens, and the Battle of Otterbourn. In the fifteenth century specimens multiply rapidly: ballad-making became in the reign of Henry VIII a fashionable amusement, the king himself setting the example; and though in the reign of Elizabeth ballads came into literary disrepute and ballad singers were brought under the law, yet there was no apparent check upon the rate of their production. Except perhaps in the north of England and south of Scotland, there was, however, a marked and increasing tendency to vulgarization as distinct from the preservation of popular qualities. The value of the better ballads was lost sight of in the flood of dull, rhythmless, and frequently scurrilous verse. The modern revival in Britain dates from the publication of Allan Ramsay's Evergreen and Tea-table Miscellany (1724-7) and of the selection Reliques made by Bishop Percy from his seventeenth-century MSS. (1765), a revival not more important for its historic interest than for the influence which it has exercised upon all subsequent poetry.
The threefold wave discernible in German, if not in British, ballad history, is equally to be traced in Spain, which alone among the Latinized countries of Europe has songs of equal age and merit with the British historic ballads. The principal difference between them is, that for the most part the Spanish romance is in trochaic, the British ballad in iambic metre. The ballads of the Cid date from about the end of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth century; and then followed an interval of more elaborate production, a revival of ballad interest in the sixteenth century, a new declension, and finally a modern and still-persisting enthusiasm.