Note 34 — Chapter XXXII
Reading edition
When looking through any of the large collections of ballads, especially those produced in the seventeenth century by the popularity of the whole class and the facility of their metrical structure, we find pertinent an excellent remark of Rengifo, in his “Arte Poética,” 1592, p. 38:—“There is nothing easier than to make a ballad, and nothing more difficult than to make it what it ought to be.”