responsible. Popular works in both prose and verse show various stages of artistry; and just as in the Anglo-Saxon epic of "Beowulf,"[1] there is evidence of the hand of a single poet of high order, so in the "Arabian Nights,"[2] for example, one may suspect that the style and structure were largely molded by a single writer, or group of writers, of skill and literary training. There are many mooted questions as to the history of the whole type, or as to the exact nature of particular works, but there can be no doubt of the existence of a great body of literature which is in a real sense public property—popular somehow in origin and transmission, and thereby determined in its character. Both the verse and the prose of this popular sort are well represented in The Harvard Classics, the former by the traditional ballads and the latter by the works enumerated above.
THE MODERN TASTE FOR POPULAR LITERATURE
Writings of the kind under consideration would probably have had a less conspicuous place in a literary or educational collection a few generations ago. For interest in popular literature, or, at least, formal attention to it on the part of the learned and cultivated, is largely a growth of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In earlier periods, and especially in those when classical standards prevailed, the study of literature meant primarily the study of great masterpieces of poetry, philosophy, or oratory, and the art of criticism consisted largely in the deduction of rules and standards from such models. The products of the people, if noticed at all by men of letters, were likely to be treated with condescension or perhaps judged by formal standards, as Addison praised the ballad of "Chevy Chase,"[3] for conforming in great measure to the narrative method of the "Æneid."[4] But in more recent times the spirit of criticism has changed, and writers have even swung to the opposite extreme of adulation of all popular products. The part of the people in composition has been magnified, until the "Iliad" or the "Beowulf" has been conceived as the actual production of a whole community. With this renewed admiration for popular literature in its highest forms has come an enthusiastic interest in all the minor products
