selves." These words may well have lent themselves to dramatic illustration. The old French analogue of the balada was called ballete, a compromise, probably, between balada and the French ballet, a diminutive of bal, meaning dance. These balletes, also artistic dance-songs composed before the middle of the thirteenth century, were, some of them, three-stanza poems with refrains, but they presented the additional feature of identical rhymes running through all three stanzas. They incorporated, as has been said, refrains which, copied from those of traditional poetry, had become the stock-in-trade of the trouvères. At least one hundred and eight of these balletes are contained in a single manuscript which is, as a matter of fact, the only place where the word has been discovered. The surviving balletes, like the surviving examples of the balada, are not, in reality, popular poetry. Though there are other and longer songs in the thirteenth century with uniform rhyme schemes throughout, there seems every reason to believe that the ballade took its three stanzas with common rhymes and refrains, from the ballete. The earliest ballades are found, often with the music to which they were sung, in the romances of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and in the works of Jehannot de Lescurel, a little-known poet of not later than the middle of the fourteenth century. These early ballades are without the envoy which later became a regular feature of the fixed form and frequently have refrains consisting of several lines. The reduction of the refrain to one line came about gradually. As early as 1339 in a poem mourning the death of William, a count of Hainault, which is called Li Regret Guillaume, there are thirty ballades, all of which have a single-line refrain. Five show seven-syllable lines; thirteen, eight-syllable lines; one, nine-syllable lines; and eleven used the ten-syllable line. Both the frequent use of the ten-syllable line and the single-line refrain show that the writer, Jehan de la Mote, belongs decidedly to the generation of Deschamps. It was Deschamps who, before dying in the first decade of the fifteenth century, composed about twelve hundred ballades, the greater number of which showed the one-line refrain. In Li Regret Guillaume, the hero, who is a trouvère, is represented as hastening to a puy d'amour in order to submit a love song. It was indeed in these very puys d'amour and in the earlier religious puys, both poetic guilds of the thirteenth century and later, that the ballade of three stanzas with common rhymes and a refrain, came to be diversified and complicated in line structure and rhyme. In the puys, too, the envoy, which had hitherto been a feature of several kinds of songs, became attached to the ballade, so that, after the opening of the fourteenth century, a ballade, whether composed in a puy or not, almost inevitably contained a conventional address to the Prince in the first line of the envoy. These same puys saw the development of the chant royal, and of other forms with envoy. The history of the word pui or puy is uncertain. It has been derived from the Latin podium, meaning "elevation," and in this sense has been supposed to refer to the platform on which the officials of the concourse sat. Other critics have derived the word from the name of the town in Velay. Some of the supporters of this latter theory believe that pilgrims from every part of France spread the fame of the Virgin of Le Puy in Velay until numerous religious societies named. in her honor sprang up in northern France. Others hold that a literary society actually existed in the town of Le Puy which was the model for similar societies in the North. Or it is possible to consider the more usual meaning of the Latin podium, namely mountain, and recall the allegory of Muses residing on a remote peak. This theory supposes that the term puy, signifying mountain, represented to religious and secular poets the heights to which they aspired to raise the subject which they were treating. As early as 1051, there was authorized a confrérie of minstrels at the Sainte-Trinité de Fécamp in Normandy. According to their charter, the purpose of their association was masses, alms, vigils, and prayers. Yearly on St. Martin's Day they walked in a procession with the monks. At a later date puys are known to have existed in Valenciennes, Arras, Rouen, Caen, Amiens, Abbéville, Dieppe, Douai, Cambray, Evreu, Lille, Bethune, and London. All the puys of the Middle Ages were originally religious in character. Their foundation was usually attributed to clerks who had had miraculous visions of the Virgin. Gradually these religious fraternities evolved into literary societies, chambers of rhetoric, and academies, with only a faint coloring of their religious purpose left. The "confrérie de Notre-Dame des Ardents" at Arras claimed to go back to the Virgin's gift of a healing candle to two minstrels during a pest in 1105. Early in the thirteenth century, so the account runs, a religious guild was founded at Arras in memory of this miracle. The statutes of the society express its purpose to save the "ardans qui ardoisent du fu d'enfer," "those brands burning in the fires of hell." Every member was to attend the meetings held three times a year, to pay dues, to succor his comrades in poverty, to follow them to the grave, and to pay a forfeit if any of these duties was neglected. In this society, which never lost its original religious character, the members classified as trouvères, the professional poets, were held first in dignity. In this puy at Arras, the president of the association was called "Prince," and to him, as representing the whole corporation, the envoys of poems, composed before and after the vogue of the ballade, were frequently addressed. This office was probably elective, and would be held only by a rich man, because a "Prince" was expected to pay the expenses of any dramatic enterprises, to fee the clergy who officiated at ceremonies, and to entertain generously. The brotherhood of the puy founded in London at the close of the thirteenth century or at the beginning of the fourteenth century, was, of course, modeled on these French confréries. The English society received from the city great privileges in connection with the Chapel of St. Mary near Guildhall, which was built toward the close of Edward I's reign. The society was religious, convivial, and literary. Its convivial aspects, feasts and processions, seem most prominent, but masses and almsgiving and a yearly literary contest also received attention. On this occasion a crown was awarded to the composer of the best chancoun reale, probably chant royal. Search of promising manuscript collections has failed to reveal any of the poems presented to the English puy. It is not unlikely, however, that both the ballade and the chant royal may have figured in its latest contests, if not in English, perhaps in French. The sessions of this puy seem to have ceased after the fourteenth century. The last important contribution to the structure of the ballade was thus the envoy, addressed or dedicated to the Prince, which, in the course of poetical contests, was added in the puys in the late fourteenth century. Thereafter, chambers of rhetoric and individual poets might vary the length of the line, contrive elaborate rhyme ornaments, or adapt the ballade to express various ideas and perform many functions, but, with the addition of the envoy, the form was fixed in its essential features. The ballade took roughly about four centuries to develop from an indeterminate dance-song to a fixed verse form. The structure of the ballade stanza was complete by the fourteenth century. We get an idea of what the various stages in the development were from the balada and the ballete. To the latter the ballade owes probably its three stanzas with uniform rhyme scheme and refrain. Other probable contributions to the form of the ballade are to be found in the chansonniers, the song collections of the thirteenth century, which contain poems with identical rhymes running through a number of stanzas; there were, too, especially in multi-stanza poems composed for presentation in the puys, envoys in which trouvères, judges, and other notabilities were addressed by name. In the late thirteenth century, three-stanza refrain poems, with the same rhymes throughout, were written and named balades, and, as the fourteenth century progressed, the refrains of many lines that had characterized the ballade, in the romances and elsewhere, were generally reduced to one line. At length, at the close of the same century, the envoy, with its conventional salute to the "Prince," was annexed, and the ballade became in France a favorite poetic type for at least two centuries to come. The ballade in the late Middle Ages captured the taste of France and even had a certain vogue in England. In the former country from the end of the fourteenth to the beginning of the sixteenth century it attained incredible popularity. Moreover, like its successor in favor, the sonnet, it came to be written in more or less closely connected sequences. With the importation into France in the sixteenth century of ideas derived ultimately from the literature of classical antiquity, the vogue of the ballade grew less pronounced until before the nineteenth century it was more or less sporadic in French literature. Then Théodore de Banville was the instrument by which it was revived. In England the |