abode seven years with the queen of fairy, recurs in "Tam Lin," "Thomas
Rymer,"[3] etc. Like all folk-songs, these ballads are anonymous and may
be regarded not as the composition of any one poet, but as the property,
and in a sense the work, of the people as a whole. Coming out of an
uncertain past, based on some dark legend of heart-break or blood-shed,
they bear no author's name, but are _ferae naturae_ and have the flavor
of wild game. They were common stock, like the national speech; everyone
could contribute toward them: generations of nameless poets, minstrels,
ballad-singers modernized their language to suit new times, altered their
dialect to suit new places, accommodated their details to different
audiences, English or Scotch, and in every way that they thought fit
added, retrenched, corrupted, improved, and passed them on.

Folk-poetry is conventional; it seems to be the production of a guild,
and to have certain well understood and commonly expected tricks of style
and verse. Freshness and sincerity are almost always attributes of the
poetry of heroic ages, but individuality belongs to a high civilization
and an advanced literary culture. Whether the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey"
are the work of one poet or of a cycle of poets, doubtless the rhetorical
peculiarities of the Homeric epics, such as the recurrent phrase and the
conventional epithet (the rosy-fingered dawn, the well-greaved Greeks,
the swift-footed Achilles, the much-enduring Odysseus, etc.) are due to
this communal or associative character of ancient heroic song. As in the
companies of architects who built the mediaeval cathedrals, or in the
schools of early Italian painters, masters and disciples, the manner of
the individual artist was subdued to the tradition of his craft.


The English and Scottish popular ballads are in various simple stanza
forms, the commonest of all being the old _septenarius_ or "fourteener,"