In course of time, however, was evolved the individual singer. In the
earlier stages of society, song was undoubtedly a common gift, and
every normal member of the community bore his part in the recital of
the heroic deeds that ordinarily formed the subject of these primeval
lays. Were it the praise of a god, of a feasting champion, or of a
slain comrade, the natural utterance was narrative. Later on, the more
fluent and inventive improvisers came to the front, and finally the
professional bard appeared. Somewhere in the process, too, the burden
may have shifted its part from under-song to alternating chorus, thus
allowing the soloist opportunity for rest and recollection.

English ballads, as we have them in print to-day, took form in a far
later and more sophisticated period than those just suggested; yet
even thus our ballads stand nearest of anything in our literature to
the primitive poetry that was born out of the social life of the
community rather than made by the solitary thought of the artist. Even
so comparatively small a group as that comprehended within this volume
shows how truly the ballad is the parent stock of all other poetic
varieties. In the ballad of plain narrative, as _The Hunting of the
Cheviot,_ the epic is hinted. We go a step further in _A Lytell Geste
of Robyn Hode,_--too long for insertion in this collection, but
peculiarly interesting from the antiquarian point of view, having been
printed, in part, as early as 1489,--and find at least a rough
foundation for a genuine hero-lay, the _Lytell Geste_ being made up of
a number of ballads rudely woven into one. A poem like this, though
hardly "an epic in miniature,"--a phrase which has been proposed as
the definition of a ballad,--is truly an epic in germ, lacking the
finish of a miniature, but holding the promise of a seed. Where the
narrative is highly colored by emotion, as in _Helen of Kirconnell_ or