The best popular ballads for the study of the repetition of the refrain are The Three Ravens, Edward, and The Two Sisters. It should also be noted that the origin of all primitive epics is ballad poetry. Were we skilled enough, we should be able to resolve the episodes of the Homeric poems or of Beowulf into their original parts.

Ballads may be classed under three heads: those dealing with magic and the supernatural, those relating episodes of Border chivalry and history, and those recounting domestic tragedies. In the first class we may place Sweet William's Ghost, Kemp Owyn, Thomas the Rymer, The Demon Lover, The Wife of Usher's Well. The Hunting of the Cheviot, Sir Patrick Spens, and The Battle of Otterburn are among the finest of the second class. The third includes The Two Sisters, Edward, The Two Brothers, Child Maurice, The Twa Corbies, and Clerk Saunders. An exquisite result of ballad making is a ballad of art called the Nut-browne Mayde, which first appeared in print in 1502. It is exquisite in sentiment, in music, and in a perfect rendering of a charming story.

The Robin Hood ballads have grown into a cycle of their own and represent a whole phase of ballad literature. What is called the Litel Geste of Robin Hode has gathered up the various ballads connected with the merry outlaw and given his story something like epic form. In this respect it resembles the cycles of romance.

Robin Hood was the ideal of the people as Arthur was of the upper class; the sympathy with him and his men betrays the inarticulate revolt against the oppression of the Norman lords which the mass of the people must have felt during the early centuries of their rule. He is the hero-yeoman, who readjusts property, robs the rich and

endows the poor, hates the fat monks, and loves the King's deer, the long bow, and the free joyous life of the Greenwood. He and his stalwart men, Little John, Scathlock, Much the Miller's Son, and Friar Tuck, embodying this sturdy resistance to oppression, are continually getting into trouble with the Sheriff of Nottingham, and many are the hard blows given and received in their encounters.

Even more than through his sworn enmity to the great officials of the Church and his love of a good fight with the forces of the law, does his hobnobbing with the poorer orders of the people, the laborers and the peasants, indicate that he is their champion. Indeed, a spirit of indefinable camaraderie exists between the lower classes and the outlaws. The butcher, the tinker, the potter, the beggar, appear often and are royally feasted by the merry men. Withal, Robin is ever loyal to his King and chivalrous to all women.

Independent archery contests were gradually identified with Robin Hood ballads, and the two finally joined with May-day festivals which went back to village festivities about the May-pole in heathen times. The May-queen gradually assumed the form of Maid Marian, perhaps from analogy with a little French pastourelle Robin et Marion which had drifted across the Channel. She does. not belong to the genuine ballads. Robin Hood plays, growing out of the archery contests and coalescing with them, were acted in the fifteenth century, being among the earliest dramatic renderings of secular themes in England. Robin Hood appears in later literature on many occasions. George-a-Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield, played in the sixteenth century, introduces a good fight between the local hero and the outlaw,

to the latter's discomfiture. The two plays called the Downfall and Death of Robert Earl of Huntington, by Anthony Munday, have raised Robin Hood to the peerage and treat him with great respect. Shakespeare's As You Like It may have been indebted to these plays. Ben Jonson wrote a charming play entitled The Sad Shepherd in which the merry outlaw is introduced. In the nineteenth century, Sir Walter Scott gave him the name of Locksley and made him partake of the thrilling adventures connected with the storming of Front de Boeuf's castle where he met the Black Knight, who after a wonderful drinking bout with Friar Tuck, revealed himself as King Richard. Thomas Love Peacock wrote of Maid Marian, and Tennyson devoted a play to the subject of Robin Hood. Howard Pyle's adaptation of the ballads for boys and his fine illustrations have accomplished much toward making these ballads popular with young people.

THE EARLY ENGLISH DRAMA

The origin of the drama lay in the need felt by the clergy for popular religious instruction. The English drama began in the Church, and for several centuries was guided through its childhood by monks who cared for the spiritual welfare of the people. At first there was but the usual reading of the lesson and the alternate responses chanted by choir and congregation. Gradually at Christmas and Easter a more elaborate setting made effective the exercise of the Mass. By the tenth century tropes, or little dramatic responses, were introduced into the Latin service. On Good Friday occurred the Processional and Burying of the Cross, and on Easter Sun

day its raising with the antiphonal "Quem Quaeritis in Sepulchro?" and the reply, "Jesu Nazarenum crucifixum" on the part of the three Marys. Then the Angel, usually a priest garbed in white robes, answered

Non est hic, surrexit sicut praedixerat.

Ite, nuniate, quia surrexit a mortuis.

The veil was then lifted and the sepulchre discovered to be empty, and a final Te Deum was sung by the choir.

On Christmas day a manger containing a crib was discovered, and a star in the ceiling guided the shepherds to the appointed place.

Gradually crude plays came to be performed before the altar on feast days, incidents from the Bible story were added, and from this simple dramatic observance grew the custom of holding little pageants before the church door, later in the churchyard. Finally, between 1250 and 1350 the plays were secularized by being placed in the hands of the trade guilds, which employed them (now written in the vernacular though still by monks) as means of advertisement.

Each guild became responsible for a single play and competed with the others in the magnificence of its presentation. Noah and the Building of the Ark went to the Carpenter's Guild, the Last Supper to the Bakers, the Shepherds' Play to the Chandlers. The great cycles were played on successive days, and as the story often continued from the Creation until the Last Judgment, a considerable time usually elapsed before the last of them was presented. The guilds spent large sums on costumes and properties, vying with each other in lavish expenditure. Movable stages passing from square to square in a large town offered pageants to the public gaze. The upper room of these crude structures was reserved for the

dressing room, though occasionally the stage contained three stories, affording separate planes for Heaven, Earth, and Hell. Hell's mouth was represented by the open jaws of a dragon, whence issued flames and into which the devils dragged their shrieking victims.

The Miracle Plays

As the religious plays developed, cycles or groups of plays were formed and these cycles have been named according to the city in which the plays were presented or the family in whose possession they were found. There were four chief cycles; the Chester Cycle contained twenty-five plays in all, the Coventry cycle forty-three, the York forty-eight, and the Towneley thirty-two. These plays were called Mystery plays (from the French word mystère, métier, guild) which treated of incidents of Bible history, and Miracle plays, or lives of the saints. These terms, however, were not carefully distinguished in England, and the word miracle usually stands for both groups.

The subject-matter of the Miracle plays consisted of Bible stories comprising a kind of dramatic cycle from the Creation till Doomsday. Plays like the Brome Abraham and Isaac show an early but very distinct dramatic sense highly developed, and reveal deep tragic feeling. There is a tendency toward realism and low comedy in the Second Shepherd's Play and in the comic treatment of Noah's wife by her sons. Pilate and the Devil, with his dagger of lath, became stock comic figures, while Herod foamed at the mouth in the street. It will be remembered that Hamlet counselled his players to avoid mouthing their lines: "it out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it."