A ballad is much shorter than a romance, and therefore much more
easily learned and remembered. So many people learned and
repeated the ballads, and for three hundred years they were the
chief literature of the people. In those days men sang far more
and read and thought far less than nowadays. Now, if we read
poetry, some of us like to be quietly by ourselves. Then all
poetry was made to be read or sung aloud, and that in company.

I do not mean you to think that we have any ballads remaining to
us as old as the thirteenth or the beginning of the fourteenth
century, which was the time in which Havelok was written. But
what I want you to understand is that the ballad-making days went
on for hundreds of years. The people for whom the ballads were
made could not read and could not write; so it was of little use
to write them down, and for a long time they were not written
down. "They were made for singing, an' no for reading," said an
old lady to Sir Walter Scott, who in his day made a collection of
ballads. "They were made for singing an' no for reading; but ye
hae broken the charm now, an' they'll never be sung mair."

And so true is this, that ballads which have never been written
down, but which are heard only in out-of-the-way places, sung or
said by people who have never learned to read, have really more
of the old-time feeling about them than many of those which we
find in books.

We cannot say who made the ballads. Nowadays a poet makes a
poem, and it is printed with his name upon the title-page. The
poem belongs to him, and is known by his name. We say, for
instance, Gray's Elegy, or Shakespeare's Sonnets. But many