The term ballad come to be loosely applied to any narrative poem in the ballad meter, i.e., in a quatrain or four lined stanza with alternate rhymes, the first and third lines being eight syllable, and the second and fourth six- syllable.
In this way, it is possible to divide ballads into two kinds of categories; the “Popular ballad’ with its simplicity, its apparent ease and artlessness, and its primitive feeling, and the “literary ballad’, the conscious imitation of a later date of the original popular ballad.