The λέξις ειρομένη and the λέξις κατασταμμένη; down to Herodotus the Greeks, it is said, spoke and wrote in the former style: Norden, I. 37, note. He appeals to specimens gathered from folklore.
“Musikalische Bildung der Meistersänger,” in Haupt’s _Zeitsch. f. deutsches Alterthum_, XX. 80 f.
The reason why a folksong often fails to have a musical effect, says Böckel in the introduction to his collection of Hessian ballads, p. civ., is because it is taken down from a single singer, whereas all these songs are essentially choral, and need the voices of a throng. This hint is valuable in many directions; for example, see below on social singing at labour.
_Zeitschrift f. Völkerpsychol. u. Sprachwissensch._ IV. 85 ff. Comparetti is also unfortunate in his use of this essay to prove that poetic prose came before verse. See his _Kalewala_, p. 37.
_English Fairy Tales_, 1898, p. 247. Ferdinand Wolf, a man not given to hazy and romantic views, dismisses the _cante-fable_ as “jedesfalls ... eine Entartung,” a degenerate state of the communal ballad. _Proben port. u. catal. Volksromanzen_, Wien, 1856, p. 20, note 2.
Alfred Nutt, _Voyage of Bran_, I. 135, citing Kuno Meyer, and saying that certain prose is “younger in appearance,” need not assume it to have “suffered from change,” but may take a simpler view. The verse may well be of older date.
This account is taken from Bruchmann’s _Poetik_, p. 217, and Letourneau, _L’Évolution Littéraire_, pp. 198 f., who gives other details. J. F. Campbell, _Popular Tales_, etc., 2d ed., IV. 84, mentions cases of dual performance in the Highlands, where a bard sang to his harp heroic passages, and a narrator “filled up the pauses by telling prose history.”
Rudow, _Verslehre und Stil der rumänischen Volkslieder_, Halle, 1886, pp. 5, 28 f., 31.
Böckel, _Deutsche Volkslieder aus Oberhessen ... mit kulturhistorisch-ethnographischer Einleitung_ (the latter a valuable collection of material), Marburg, 1885, pp. clxxxiii. f.
Mingled verse and prose has always a late, artificial manner; for example, the _Satura Menippea_, imitated in Latin by Varro and Petronius (Teuffel and Schwabe, _Hist. Roman Literature_, trans. Warr, I. 255), and claimed for the half-rhythmical portion of Swift’s _Battle of the Books_, by Feyerabend, _Englische Studien_, XI. 487 ff. Some of Feyerabend’s scanning, by the way, is highly adventurous.