Thirty years ago blue china was a kind of fetish in some circles,
aesthetic circles, of which the balladist was not a member.

The ballade was an old French form of verse, in France revived by
Theodore de Banville, and restored to an England which had long
forgotten the Middle Ages, by my friends Mr. Austin Dobson and Mr.
Edmund Gosse. They, so far as I can trust my memory, were the first
to reintroduce these pleasant old French nugae, while an anonymous
author let loose upon the town a whole winged flock of ballades of
amazing dexterity. This unknown balladist was Mr. Henley; perhaps
he was the first Englishman who ever burst into a double ballade,
and his translations of two of Villon's ballades into modern
thieves' slang were marvels of dexterity. Mr. Swinburne wrote a
serious ballade, but the form, I venture to think, is not 'wholly
serious,' of its nature, in modern days; and he did not persevere.
Nor did the taste for these trifles long endure. A good ballade is
almost as rare as a good sonnet, but a middling ballade is almost as
easily written as the majority of sonnets. Either form readily
becomes mechanical, cheap and facile. I have heard Mr. George
Meredith improvise a sonnet, a Petrarchian sonnet, obedient to the
rules, without pen and paper. He spoke 'and the numbers came'; he
sonneted as easily as a living poet, in his Eton days, improvised
Latin elegiacs and Greek hexameters.

The sonnet endures. Mr. Horace Hutchinson wrote somewhere: "When
you have read a sonnet, you feel that though there does not seem to
be much of it, you have done a good deal, as when you have eaten a
cold hard-boiled egg." Still people keep on writing sonnets,
because the sonnet is wholly serious. In an English sonnet you
cannot easily be flippant of pen. A few great poets have written