These practices are world-wide, and world-old. The thoroughly
popular songs, thus evolved, became the rude material of a
professional class of minstrels, when these arose, as in the heroic
age of Greece. A minstrel might be attached to a Court, or a
noble; or he might go wandering with song and harp among the
people. In either case, this class of men developed more regular
and ample measures. They evolved the hexameter; the laisse of the
Chansons de Geste; the strange technicalities of Scandinavian
poetry; the metres of Vedic hymns; the choral odes of Greece. The
narrative popular chant became in their hands the Epic, or the
mediaeval rhymed romance. The metre of improvised verse changed
into the artistic lyric. These lyric forms were fixed, in many
cases, by the art of writing. But poetry did not remain solely in
professional and literary hands. The mediaeval minstrels and
jongleurs (who may best be studied in Leon Gautier's Introduction
to his Epopees Francaises) sang in Court and Camp. The poorer,
less regular brethren of the art, harped and played conjuring
tricks, in farm and grange, or at street corners. The foreign
newer metres took the place of the old alliterative English verse.
But unprofessional men and women did not cease to make and sing.
Some writers have decided, among them Mr. Courthope, that our
traditional ballads are degraded popular survivals of literary
poetry. The plots and situations of some ballads are, indeed, the
same as those of some literary mediaeval romances.
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