But out and spak their stepmother.

Such is, finally, a kind of sing-song repetition, which doubtless helped
the ballad singer to memorize his stock, as, for example,

She had'na pu'd a double rose,
A rose but only twae.

Or again,

And mony ane sings o' grass, o' grass,
And mony ane sings o' corn;
An mony ane sings o' Robin Hood,
Kens little whare he was born.

It was na in the ha', the ha',
Nor in the painted bower;
But it was in the gude green wood,
Amang the lily flower.

Copies of some of these old ballads were hawked about in the 16th
century, printed in black letter, "broadsides," or single sheets. Wynkyn
de Worde printed in 1489 _A Lytell Geste of Robin Hood_, which is a sort
of digest of earlier ballads on the subject. In the 17th century a few
of the English popular ballads were collected in miscellanies called
_Garlands_. Early in the 18th century the Scotch poet, Allan Ramsay,
published a number of Scotch ballads in the _Evergreen_ and _Tea-Table
Miscellany_. But no large and important collection was put forth until
Percy's _Reliques_ (1765), a book which had a powerful influence upon