This material, so varied, so freshly spontaneous and imaginative, the minstrels shaped into ballads, setting them to music now wild and weird, now tragic and mournful, now sweet and debonair. So they played and sang the ballads in cottage, bower, and hall, moulding them to the delight and humours of their hearers, changing them to suit time and place. Thus there grew up many versions of a single ballad.
The old folk, too, the gaffers and gammers by the fireside, learned the ballads and recited or sung them to the children; who in their turn, when they became old, told them to other children. Thus the old songs were passed along by word of mouth from generation to generation, from countryside to countryside, and even from one land to another.
As was natural in those coarse old times, much that was unsuitable for children was woven into the ballads; which to-day makes it a difficult task to compile a representative juvenile collection. For, as Spenser so aptly put it when writing of Irish bards, they “seldom use to choose unto themselves the doings of good men for the arguments of their poems, but whomsoever they find to be ... most bold and lawless in his doings, most dangerous and desperate in all parts of disobedience and rebellious disposition, him they set up and glorify in their rhymes, him they praise to the people, and to young men make an example to follow.”
But Spenser’s criticism of the Irish bards is far too violent a stricture on all Scottish and English ballad literature. For there are Scottish and English ones, clean, merry, and nobly heroic; fine and wholesome reading for our boys and girls.
For Sir Walter Scott’s romantic tastes and his interest in Highland and Border life were awakened and fired, when he was a boy, by reading ballads. And Sir Philip Sydney wrote in his _Defence of Poetry_, “Certainly, I must confess mine own barbarousness; I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas, that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet; and yet it is sung but by some blind crowder, with no rougher voice than rude style ... In Hungary I have seen it the manner at all feasts, and all other such-like meetings, to have songs of their ancestors’ valour, which that right soldier-like nation think one of the chiefest kindlers of brave courage.”