But
what I want you to understand is that the ballad-making days went
on for hundreds of years. The people for whom the ballads were
made could not read and could not write; so it was of little use
to write them down, and for a long time they were not written
down. "They were made for singing, an' no for reading," said an
old lady to Sir Walter Scott, who in his day made a collection of
ballads. "They were made for singing an' no for reading; but ye
hae broken the charm now, an' they'll never be sung mair."
And so true is this, that ballads which have never been written
down, but which are heard only in out-of-the-way places, sung or
said by people who have never learned to read, have really more
of the old-time feeling about them than many of those which we
find in books.
We cannot say who made the ballads. Nowadays a poet makes a
poem, and it is printed with his name upon the title-page. The
poem belongs to him, and is known by his name. We say, for
instance, Gray's Elegy, or Shakespeare's Sonnets.
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