Note 436 — Chapter V · THE DIFFERENCING ELEMENTS OF COMMUNAL POETRY

Professor Earle confuses, in a very uncritical way, the garrulity of romances with the garrulity of epics and of ballads: see his Deeds of Béowulf, p. xlix. A “voluble and rambling loquacity,” he says, is the “natural character of the lay, and still more of the epic, which is a compilation of lays.” And presently he says that the romances are “the nearest extant representative of that unwritten literature which from the very nature of things was undisciplined and loquacious.” Confusion could hardly go beyond this.