and this fact alone will help us to realize the wide difference between those early days and our own. We can imagine how much time and labor were required to make a neat copy of a learned treatise or a long poem, and we cannot wonder that manuscript volumes were scarce and often very costly. There were precious manuscripts at the monasteries, the universities, and in the libraries of some of the nobles or the wealthy, but the people, as a whole, were without books altogether. In the fourteenth century Chaucer's Clerk, whose whole mind was given to learning, evidently thought that a library of twenty books was a great possession, and we are told of a gentleman who, shortly before the introduction of printing, had succeeded in collecting thirty volumes. The large majority of the population could neither read nor write; they could not afford to own books, and they were unable to use them. But while the plain people, the plowmen and the milkmaids, the sailors, carpenters, and weavers, lived without books, they did not live without literature in the widest sense of the word. Indeed, there were those who, while they could not read, yet cared more for poetry than thousands do now among those that we call educated. While poets like Chaucer and his followers wrote for the Court and for the rich and noble, the people had poets and a poetry of their own. They had their songs, composed perhaps by some rustic and now forgotten poet, or handed down from the distant past, and men and women sang at their work, children sang at their play, or the youths and maidens sang in the long twilight as they danced on the village green. It was long before this love of song entirely died out among the people. In the sixteenth century Shakespeare speaks of women chanting an old and simple song

as they sit spinning or knitting in the sunshine. In the seventeenth, Milton, in his cheerful description of a summer morning in the country, shows us the milkmaid singing at daybreak, and the plowman whistling as he bends over his furrow. Even so late as the eighteenth century, Robert Burns, a farmer's boy in Scotland, composed two of his best poems while he was plowing.

Such allusions or incidents, slight as they are, help us to see that even long after books came into general use, singing and sometimes the making of songs was part of the people's everyday life. And besides these short songs the people had their stories in verse or in prose. Sir Philip Sidney, the pattern of noble knighthood in Queen Elizabeth's time, says that the stories told or sung by the poets were so delightful that children stayed away from their play to listen to them, and old men left their comfortable nook in the chimney corner. Milton pictures the village rustics after a day's merry-making, telling stories of fairies and goblins over the "nut-brown ale." Among all this mass of popular song and legend were those stories in verse, sung, or at least adapted to singing, which we commonly call the old ballads. These ballads held much the same place in the literature of the people that the longer and more elaborate romances did in the literature of the upper classes.

The authors of these ballads are unknown, nor do we know very definitely how or when they were composed. Some of them may have originally been made by wandering musicians, and sung or recited in taverns, in the streets, or at some village festivity. Others may have been composed by unknown singers among the people themselves. We must remember that in old days the gift of making verse was not confined to a literary or

professional class, it was a popular accomplishment. It was not until some time after printing had made books more common, and the people had got in the habit of reading their stories or poems instead of making or singing them for themselves, that this unwritten popular literature gradually lost its importance.

Many of the old ballads which have been collected and preserved are thought to date from the fifteenth century. Whatever their origin, we know that they were remembered and repeated by the country people: that children learned them from their elders, and that they were changed and perhaps improved or added to by one or another among the many who recited them. In the ballads some story is told in a simple style. No time is taken up with elaborate descriptions of Nature, or lengthy reflections. No doubt those simple folk that made or listened to the old ballads liked the story itself better than tiresome explanations or comments, and they wanted it told in a way that they could easily understand. It might be a story of some of the exploits of the brave outlaw Robin Hood, of a gallant fight like that between Percy and Douglas on the Scottish border, of a ghost that came at midnight to her lover's door, of a knight that was taken away to fairy-land by the queen of the fairies, and released from the spell by a maiden's love,

- whatever it was it was told in a plain, straightforward, fashion that often made it seem very real. This lack of artificiality and pretense is one of the greatest charms of these old ballads, and they are often very touching because the feeling in them is deep and true. To feel this we must read the ballads for ourselves and learn to love them, but a few examples may show something of their style and spirit.

Thus, in a ballad about an outlaw called Johnnie

Armstrong, we are thrilled by the spirit of some old hero who could die but never yield:

"Says Johnnie, 'Fight on my merry men all!

I'm a little wounded, but I'm not slain:

I will lay me down to bleed awhile,

And then rise and fight with you again."

Or here in the famous ballad of Sir Patrick Spens, which tells of the shipwreck of that knight on a voyage from Norway to Scotland, we find a touch of beauty and pathos:

"O lang lang may the ladies sit,

Wi' their fans into their hand,
Before they see Sir Patrick Spens
Come sailing to the Strand!

"And lang, lang may the maidens sit,
Wi' their gowd kaims in their hair,

A' waiting for their ain dear loves,
For them they'll see na mair.

"O forty miles off Aberdeen

'Tis fifty fathoms deep,

And there lies gude Sir Patrick Spens,

Wi' the Scots lords at his feet."

As has been said, the ballads deal with human life, with the joys and sorrows of men and women. Yet while little is said about the great world of Nature, we are constantly made to feel its presence as the background to human action. In those days people passed a great part of their time out-of-doors, and the sights and sounds of the country were a familiar part of their daily life. The ballad-maker did not describe the braes or forests, the streams, or the sea, as a modern poet would be likely to do, but in reading the old ballads we

are constantly reminded that these adventures took place, for the most part, not in the towns but under the open sky. In Robin Hood we are in the merry greenwood, where it is pleasant to hear the birds sing; in another ballad a maiden dreams of gathering the heather with her lover on the braes of Yarrow; in another we are told of a knight treacherously slain in a lonely spot:

"Mony's the one for him makes mane, (moan)
But nane sall ken whar he is gane,

O'er his white banes, when they are bare,
The wind sall blaw for evermair."

So Nature in the ballads is very real to us because to the people who made these poems, as well as to those that heard them, Nature was one of the familiar facts of life.

Religious Drama. Besides their songs and stories and ballads, the people of fifteenth-century England had yet another form of literature. They had a drama, short, crude plays on religious subjects, performed on village greens, or in the streets of some of the towns. It will be more convenient for us to treat of these Miracle Plays, as they were called, in connection with the great drama of Shakespeare's time, for which they partly prepared the way. But we should be careful not to think of them merely as a preparation for a great dramatic period that then lay in the future. They were a part of the people's literature, a part of the people's life. Neither the actors in the fifteenth-century miracle plays nor their audiences asked themselves whether they were influencing the drama of the future: the plays were an end in themselves.

Coming of the New Learning. So far in our study of the fifteenth century we have seen that various