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Excerpt from Ballad Stories
Our ballads, however, are in the main the productions of individual singers, working on older material, and in¿uenced by the tradition of older models. These singers were poets of the people, who cared only for the song itself, who did not seek for posthumous glory, and who have left no name. In some instances a professional minstrel may have been the poet. In Some instances he may have taken the matter of his story from some medieval'romance, and Condensed it into a ballad. Again, in some instances, the story may have been a fragment of contemporary or recent history, and the persons of the narrative may have been the actual persons of history. But history repeats itself, and history sometimes bears a resemblance to romance or fictitious narrative. With an alteration of names, and a slight recasting of incidents, it would sometimes have been easy to adapt an older theme to contemporary events, and heighten the interest of traditional romance with the interest of historical actuality.
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