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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Balladists, by John Geddie
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Balladists
+       Famous Scots Series
+
+Author: John Geddie
+
+Release Date: August 17, 2009 [EBook #29713]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BALLADISTS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Susan Skinner and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE BALLADISTS
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration:
+
+THE BALLADISTS
+
+BY
+JOHN
+GEDDIE
+
+FAMOUS
+.SCOTS.
+.SERIES.
+
+PUBLISHED BY
+OLIPHANT ANDERSON
+& FERRIER . EDINBURGH
+AND LONDON
+
+]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The designs and ornaments of this volume are by Mr. Joseph Brown, and
+the printing from the press of Messrs. T. and A. Constable, Edinburgh.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+Not much more has been attempted in these pages than to extract the
+marrow of the Scottish Ballad Minstrelsy. They will have served their
+purpose if they help to awaken, or to renew, a relish for the contents
+of the Ballad Book. To know and love these grand old songs is its own
+exceeding great reward; and it is also, alas! almost the only means now
+left to us of knowing something concerning their nameless writers.
+
+Questions involving literary or critical controversy as to the age and
+genuineness of the ballads have been, as far as possible, avoided in
+this popular presentation of their beauties and their qualities; and in
+case any challenge may be made of the origin or authenticity of the
+passages quoted, I may say that, in nearly every case, I have prudently,
+and of purpose, refrained from giving the authority for my text, and
+have taken that which best pleases my own ear or has clung most closely
+to my memory.
+
+J. G.
+
+_July 1896._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+CHAPTER I
+
+BALLAD CHARACTERISTICS                                                 9
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+BALLAD GROWTH AND BALLAD HISTORY                                      24
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+BALLAD STRUCTURE AND BALLAD STYLE                                     43
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE MYTHOLOGICAL BALLAD                                               58
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE ROMANTIC BALLAD                                                   83
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE HISTORICAL BALLAD                                                108
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+CONCLUSION                                                           128
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+BALLAD CHARACTERISTICS
+
+    'Layes that in harping
+    Ben y-found of ferli thing;
+    Sum beth of wer, and sum of wo,
+    Sum of joye and mirthe also;
+    And sum of treacherie and gile;
+    Of old aventours that fell while;
+    And sum of bourdes and ribaudy;
+    And many ther beth of faery,--
+    Of all things that men seth;
+    Maist o' love forsoth they beth.'
+
+        _The Lay of the Ash._
+
+
+Who would set forth to explore the realm of our Ballad Literature needs
+not to hamper himself with biographical baggage. Whatever misgivings and
+misadventures may beset him in his wayfaring, there is no risk of
+breaking neck or limb over dates or names. For of dates and names and
+other solid landmarks there are none to guide us in this misty
+morning-land of poetry. The balladist is 'a voice and nothing more'--a
+voice singing in a chorus of others, in which only faintly and
+uncertainly we sometimes fancy we can make out the note, but rarely
+anything of the person or history, of the individual singer. In the
+hierarchy of song, he is a priest after the order of Melchisedec--without
+father or mother, beginning of days or end of life.
+
+The Scottish ballads we may thus love and know by heart, and concerning
+their preservation, collection, collation, we may gather a large store
+of facts. But the original ballad-writers themselves must remain for us
+the Great Unknown. Here and there one can lay down vague lines that seem
+to confine a particular ballad, or group of ballads, within particular
+bounds of place and of time. Here and there one seems to get a glimpse
+of the balladist himself, as onlooker or as actor in the scenes of
+fateful love and deathless grief which he has fixed for ever in the
+memory of men of his race and blood. There are passages in which, in the
+light and heat of battle, or in agony of terror or sorrow, we are made
+to see something of the minstrel as well as his theme. But by no
+research are we likely at this late date to recover any clew to the
+birthplace or to the lineaments of the life and face of the grand old
+poet who wrote the grand old ballad of _Sir Patrick Spens_; nor do towns
+contend for the honour of having produced the sweet singer of
+_Kirkconnel Lea_, the blithe minstrel of _Glenlogie_, or the first of
+all the bards who made the _Dowie Dens of Yarrow_ vocal with the song of
+unavailing sorrow.
+
+And in truth towns--even such towns as were in those days--could have
+had but little to do with the birth and shaping of the Scottish
+Balladists. Chief among the marks by which we may the true ballad-maker
+know among the verse-makers of his age, is the open-air feeling that
+pervades his thought and style. Like the Black Douglas, he likes better
+to hear the laverock sing than the mouse cheep. It is not only that he
+cares to tread 'the bent sae brown' rather than the paved street; that
+the tragedies of fiery love and hate quenched by death, in which he
+delights, are more often enacted under the blue cope of heaven than
+under vault of stone. What we seem to feel is that these simple old
+lays, in which lives a passion that still catches the breath and makes
+the cheek turn pale--whose 'words of might' have yet the power to waft
+us, mind and sense, into the 'Land of Faery,' must have been conceived
+and brought to full strength under the light of the sun and the breath
+of the wind. 'The Muse,' says Robert Burns, himself of the true kin of
+the balladists:
+
+    'The Muse, nae Poet ever fand her,
+    Till by himsel' he learned to wander,
+    Adown some trottin' burn's meander,
+            An' no think lang.'
+
+Certainly no true ballad was ever hammered out at the desk. It may have
+been wrought and fashioned for singing in bower or hall; but the fire
+that shaped it was caught, in gloaming grey or under the 'lee licht o'
+the mune,' in birken shaw or by wan water.
+
+It is true that one of the earliest of the Scots ballad-makers whose
+names have been handed down to us--Robert Henryson, who taught the
+Dunfermline bairns in the hornbook in the fifteenth century--has told us
+that he sought inspiration at the ingleside over a glass:
+
+    'I mend the fyre, and beikit me about,
+      Then tuik ane drink my spreitis to confort,
+    And armit me weill fra the cold thairout;
+      To cut the winter nicht, and mak it schort,
+      I tuik ane quhair, and left all uther sport.'
+
+But this was while conning, in cold weather, the classic tale of
+_Troilus and Cressid_. _Robin and Makyne_, which among Henryson's
+acknowledged pieces (except _The Bluidy Sark_) comes nearest to our
+conception of the ballad--after all it is but a pastoral--has the scent
+of the 'grene wode' in summer.
+
+In sooth, the Ballad Poet was neither made nor born; he grew. The 'wild
+flowers of literature' is the name that has been bestowed, with some
+little air of condescension, upon the rich inheritance he has left us.
+They are the purest and the strongest growth of the genius of the race
+and of the soil; and though they owe little save injury and mutilation
+to those who have deliberately sought to prune and trim them to please a
+later taste, they are as full of vigour and sap to-day as they were in
+the Ballad Age, when such poetry sprung up naturally and spontaneously.
+It is probable that not one of the old ballads that have come down to us
+by oral recitation is the product of a single hand; or of twenty hands.
+The greater its age, and the greater its popular favour, the greater is
+the number of individual memories and imaginations through which it has
+been filtered, taking from each some trace of colour, some flavour of
+style or character, some improving or modifying touch. The 'personal
+equation' is, in the ballad, a quantity at once immense and unknown. As
+in Homer's _Iliad_, the voice we hear is not that of any individual
+poet, but of an age and of a people--a voice simple, almost monotonous,
+in its rhythmic rise and fall, but charged with meanings multitudinous
+and unutterable.
+
+The Scottish ballads are undoubtedly, in their present form, the outcome
+of a long and strenuous process of selection. In its earlier stages, the
+ballad was not written down but passed from mouth to mouth. Additions,
+interpolations, changes infinite must have been made in the course of
+transmission and repetition. Like a hardy plant, it had the power to
+spread and send down fresh roots wherever it found favourable soil; and
+in its new ground it always, as we shall see, took some colour and
+character from the locality, the time, and the race. Golden lines and
+verses may have been shed in the passage from place to place and down
+the centuries. But less of this happened, we may feel sure, than a
+purging away of the dross. As a rule, what was fittest--what was truest
+to nature and to human nature--survived and was perpetuated in this
+evolution of the ballad. When, in the course of its progress, it
+gathered to itself anything that was precious and worthy of remembrance,
+then, by the very law of things, this was seized and stored in the
+memories of the listeners and handed down to future generations.
+
+But this process of purging and refining the ballad, so that it shall
+become--like the language, the proverbs, the folklore and nursery tales,
+and the traditional music of a nation--the reflection of the history and
+character of the race itself, if it is to be genuine, must go on
+unconsciously. As soon as the ballad is written down--at least as soon
+as it is fixed in print--the elements of natural growth it possesses are
+arrested. It is removed from its natural environment and means of
+healthy subsistence and development; and from a hardy outdoor plant it
+is in danger of becoming a plant of the closet--a potted thing, watered
+with printer's ink and trimmed with the editorial shears. Ballads have
+sprung up and blossomed in a literary age; but as soon as the spirit
+that is called literary seizes upon them and seeks to mould them to its
+forms, they begin to droop and to lose their native bloom and wild-wood
+fragrance. It is because they neglect, or are ignorant of, literary
+models and conventions, and go back to the 'eternal verities' of human
+passion and human motive and action--because they speak to 'the great
+heart of man'--that they are what they are.
+
+Few of our ballads have escaped those sophisticated touches of art,
+which, happily, are easily detected in the rough homespun of the old
+lays. Walter Scott, the last of the minstrels, to whom ballad literature
+owes more than to any who went before or who has come after him, was
+himself not above mending the strains gathered from the lips of old
+women, hill shepherds, and the wandering tribe of cadgers and hawkers,
+so that one is sometimes a little at a loss to tell what is original and
+what is imitation. But even the Wizard's hand is not cunning enough to
+patch the new so deftly upon the old that the difference cannot be
+detected. The genuine ballad touch is incommunicable; to improve upon it
+is like painting the lilies of the field.
+
+In the ranks of the Balladists, then, we do not include the many writers
+of merit--some of them of genius--who have worked in the lines of the
+elder race of singers, copying their measures and seeking to enter into
+their spirit. The studied simplicity, the deliberate archaisms, the
+overstrained vigour or pathos of these modern ballads do but convince us
+that the vein is well-nigh worked out. The writers could not help
+thinking of their models and materials; the old minstrels sang with no
+thought but telling what they saw with their eyes and heard with their
+ears. But even in these days the precious lode of ballad poetry will
+sometimes break to the surface; a phrase or a whole verse, fashioned in
+the Iron Age, will recall the Age of Gold. Scott has many such; and, to
+take a more modern instance, the spirit of _Sir Patrick Spens_ seems to
+inspire almost throughout George MacDonald's _Yerl o' Watery Deck_, now
+with a graphic stroke of description, anon with a sudden gleam of
+humour, as when the Skipper, in haste to escape his pursuers, hacked
+with his sword at the stout rope that bound his craft to the pier,
+
+    'And thocht it oure weel made';
+
+and again when the King's Daughter chose between father and lover in
+words that leap forth like a sword from its scabbard:
+
+    'I loot me low to my father for grace,
+      Down on my bended knee;
+    But I rise, and I look my king in the face,
+      For the Skipper 's the king o' me.'
+
+But even here, where we touch high-water mark of the latter-day Scottish
+ballad, one seems to find a faint reminiscence of stage-setting and
+effect, of purposed antithesis, of ethical discriminations unfamiliar to
+the manner and mode of thought of the ancient balladist. The latter, it
+may be said, does not stop to think or to analyse or moralise; he feels,
+and is content to tell us in the most direct and naive language, all
+that he has felt. He has not learned the new trick of introspection; he
+is guided by intuition and the primaeval instincts. He carries from his
+own lips to ours a draught of pure, strong, human passion, stirred into
+action by provocations of love, jealousy, revenge, and grief such as
+visit but rarely our orderly, workaday modern world. He renders for us
+the 'form and express feature' of his time, and though the
+draughtsmanship may be rude, it is free from suspicion of either
+flattery or bias. It is not enlisted in the cause of any moral theory or
+literary ideal. It is, so far as it goes, truth naked and not ashamed.
+
+But the native-grown ballad takes also colour from the ground whence it
+springs. It has the tang of the soil as well as the savour of the blood.
+Fletcher of Saltoun's hackneyed epigram, 'Let me make a country's
+ballads, and let who will make its laws,' does not embody all the truth.
+A country and the race inhabiting it may not be responsible for the laws
+that govern it. But a country and a people may rightly be tried and
+judged by their ballads--their own handiwork; their own offspring. The
+more cultured and highly-developed products of a national literature,
+however healthy, however strong and beautiful, must always owe much to
+neighbouring and to universal influences. Like the language and manners
+of the educated classes of a nation, they conform more or less to models
+of world-wide and age-long acceptance among educated men. But in the
+ballad one goes to the root of national character, to the pith and
+marrow of national life and history.
+
+What then, thus questioned, do the Scottish ballads teach us of Scotland
+and the Scots? Surely much to be proud of. They are among the most
+precious, as they are among the oldest, of our possessions as a people.
+Nay, it may be held that they are the best and choicest of all the
+contributions that Scotland has made to poetry and story. They are
+written in her heart's blood. Even the songs of Burns and the tales of
+Scott must take second rank after the ballads; their purest inspiration
+was drawn from those rude old lays. In this field of national
+literature, at least, we need not fear comparison with any other land
+and people. Our ballads are distinctly different, and in the opinion of
+unbiassed literary judges, also distinctly superior to the rich and
+beautiful ballad-lore of the Southern Kingdom. One can even note an
+expressive diversity of style and spirit in the ballads originating on
+the North and on the South margin of the Border line. The latter do not
+yield in rough vigour and blunt manliness to the ballads grown on the
+northern slope of Cheviot. _Chevy Chase_ may challenge comparison with
+_The Battle of Otterburn_, and come at least as well out of the contest
+as the Percy did from his meeting with the Douglas; and in many other
+ballads which the two nations have in common--_The Heir of Linn_, for
+example--the English may fairly be held to bear away the bell from the
+Scottish version. We do not possess a group of ballads pervaded so
+thoroughly with the freedom and delight of living under 'the leaves
+greene' as those of the Robin Hood Cycle; although we also have our
+songs of the 'gay greenwood'; although bows twanged as keenly in Ettrick
+Forest and in Braidislee Wood as in Sherwood itself, and we can even
+claim, partly, perhaps, as a relic of the days when the King of Scotland
+was Prince of Cumbria and Earl of Huntingdon, the bold Robin and his
+merry men among the heroes of our ballad literature.
+
+But, on the whole, mirth and light-heartedness are very far from being
+characteristics of the Scottish ballads. Of ballad themes in general, it
+has been said that they concern themselves mainly with the tragedy and
+the pathos of the life of feudal and early times; while, on the other
+hand, the folk-song reflects the sunnier hours of the days of old. This
+is peculiarly true of the Scottish ballads. The best of them are dipped
+in gloom of the grave. They breathe the very soul of 'the old, unhappy
+far-off times.' Even over the true lovers, Fate stands from the first
+with a drawn sword; and the story ends with the 'jow of the deid bell'
+rather than with the wedding chimes. Superstitious terrors, too, add a
+shadow of their own to these tragedies of crossed and lawless love and
+swift-following vengeance. In this respect, the Scottish ballads are
+more nearly akin to the popular poetry of Denmark and other countries
+across the North Sea, than to that of our neighbours across the Tweed.
+There are a score of ballads that agree so closely in plot and
+structure, and even in names and phrases, with Norse or German versions,
+that it is impossible to doubt that they have been drawn directly from
+the same source. Either they have been transplanted thither in the many
+descents which the Northmen made on Scotland, as is witnessed not only
+by the chronicles, but by existing words, and customs, and place-names
+scattered thickly around our coasts; or, what may perhaps be as strongly
+argued, both versions may have come from an older and common original.
+
+Celtic influences are also present, although scarcely, perhaps, so
+directly manifest as might have been expected, considering that the
+Celtic race and speech must at one time have been spread almost
+universally over Scotland; they appear rather in the spirit than in the
+plot and scene and characters of the typical Scottish ballad. They
+supply, unquestionably, a large portion of that feeling of mystery, of
+over-shadowing fate, and melancholy yearning--that air of another world
+surrounding and infecting the life of the senses--which seems to
+distinguish the body and soul of Scottish ballad poetry from the more
+matter-of-fact budget of the English minstrels.
+
+But it has to be remembered that the matrix of the ballads that have
+taken first place in the love and in the memory of Scotland was the
+region most remote and isolated from the Highlands and the Highlanders
+during the ballad-making era. This is the basin of the Tweed--the howms
+of Yarrow; Leader haughs and Ettrick shaws; the clear streams that flow
+past ruined abbey and peel-tower, through green folds of the Cheviots
+and the Lammermuirs, that for hundreds of years were the chosen homes of
+Border war and romance. Next after these come the banks of Clyde and
+Forth; Annan Water and the streams of Ayr and Galloway; and ballads and
+ballad localities, differing somewhat, in theme and structure, in mood
+and metre, from those of the South, as Aberdonian differs from Borderer,
+and the Men of the Mearns from the Men of the Merse, are found scattered
+thinly or sprinkled thickly over the whole North, by Tay, and Dee, and
+Spey.
+
+These latter streams are partly without and partly within the Highland
+Line, across which, as unacquainted with a language that has its own
+rich and peculiar store of legend and ballad poetry, we do not propose
+to penetrate; sufficient field for exploration is provided by the Scots
+ballads in Scots. But when these were in the making, the Highland Line
+must have run down much lower into the Lowlands than it does to-day; the
+retreating Gaelic had still outposts in Buchan, and even in Fife, and
+Ayr, and Galloway. In the ballads of the North-eastern Counties, the
+feuds of Highland chiefs and the raids of Highland caterans make
+themselves seen and felt, too visibly and not too sympathetically, in
+the ditties of their Lowland neighbours. 'The Hielandmen' play the part
+that the English clans from Bewcastle and Redesdale play in the Border
+ballads. The 'Red Harlaw' in those boreal provinces was a landmark and
+turning-point in history and poetry, as Bannockburn or Flodden was in
+the South. By Hangingshaws or Hermitage Castle they knew little of the
+Highlander, being too much absorbed in their own quarrels; on Donside
+and in the Lennox they knew him better than they liked him; and it was
+not until a comparatively recent period of literary history that the
+kilted warrior began to take his place as a heroic and imposing figure
+in the poetry and prose of the Scottish vernacular.
+
+Making all allowance for borrowings and influences drawn from without,
+may we not still say that the Scottish ballad owes nearly all that is
+best in it--the sweetness not less than the strength of this draught of
+old poetry and passion--to the land and to the folk that gave it birth?
+A land thrust further into the gloom and cold of stormy seas than the
+Southern Kingdom; a land whose spare gifts are but the more esteemed by
+its children because they are given so grudgingly, whose high and bleak
+and stern features make the valleys they shelter the more lovely and
+loved from the contrast; a race whose blood has been blended of many
+strains, and tempered by long centuries of struggle with nature and with
+outside enemies; perfervid of spirit and dour of will; holding with
+strong grip to the things of this world, but never losing consciousness
+of the nearness and mystery of the world of things invisible; with a
+border-line on either side of them that for hundreds of years had to be
+kept with the strong hand and the stout heart, and behind them a
+background of history more charged with trouble and romance than that of
+almost any other nation in Europe--where should the ballad draw pith and
+sap and colour if not on such a soil and among such a people? If Mr.
+Buckle was able to trace the complexion and form of Scottish religion in
+the climate and configuration of Scotland, much more easily should we be
+able to find the atmosphere and scenery of Scotland reflected in her
+ballads.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+BALLAD GROWTH AND BALLAD HISTORY
+
+    _Clown_--What hast here? ballads?
+
+    _Mopsa_--Pray now, buy some: I love a ballad in print, a' life;
+    for then we are sure they are true.--_Winter's Tale._
+
+
+There is probably not a verse, there is scarcely a line, in the existing
+body of Scottish ballad poetry that can be traced with certainty further
+back than the sixteenth century. Many of them chronicle events that took
+place in the seventeenth century, and there are a few that deal with
+even later history. It may seem a bold thing, therefore, to claim for
+these traditional tales in verse the much more venerable antiquity
+implied in what has been said in the previous chapter. If we were to be
+guided by the accessible literary and historical data, or even by the
+language of the ballads themselves, we should be disposed to believe
+that the productive period of ballad-making was confined within two or
+at most three hundred years.
+
+It would be more than rash, however, to imagine that ballads did not
+live and grow and spread in the obscure but fertile ground of the
+popular fancy and the popular memory, because they did not crop up in
+the contemporary printed literature, and were overlooked by the
+dry-as-dust chroniclers of the time. Nor is it a paradox to say that a
+ballad may be older, by ages, than the hero and the deeds that it seems
+to celebrate. Like thistledown it has the property of floating from
+place to place, and even from kingdom to kingdom and from epoch to
+epoch, changing names and circumstances to suit the locality, and
+attaching itself to outstanding figures and fresh events without
+changing its essential spirit and character. The more formal Muses
+despised these rude and unlettered rhymes--when they noticed them at all
+it was in a disdainful or patronising spirit--and this holds true of the
+eighteenth century almost as much as of the sixteenth. It is not that
+ballad poetry was dumb, but that history was deaf and blind to its
+beauties.
+
+Nor is any adverse judgment as to the antiquity of the Scottish ballad
+to be drawn from the comparative modernity of the style and language.
+The presence of archaisms in a ballad that claims to have been handed
+down by oral repetition from a remote period is, on the contrary, a
+thing to raise suspicion as to its genuineness. The ballad, as has been
+said, is a living and growing organism; or at least it is this until it
+has been committed to print. However deep into the mould of the past its
+roots run down, its language and idioms should not be much older than
+the popular speech of the time when it has been gathered into the
+collector's budget. It is like a plant that, while remaining the same
+at the heart and root, is constantly casting the old, and putting out
+fresh, leaves.
+
+Thus the very words and phrases that were intended to give an antique
+air to _Hardyknut_ stamped it as an imitation; these clumsy and
+artificial patches were not the true mosses of age. The ballad of true
+lineage, partly from its simplicity of thought and structure, partly
+from being kept in immediate contact with the lips and the hearts of the
+people, is as readily 'understanded of the general' to-day as when it
+was first sung.
+
+It has been noted, for instance, that our ballads preserve fewer
+reminiscences of the time when alliteration shared importance with rhyme
+or took its place in the metrical system. The bulk of them are supposed
+to come hither from the early sixteenth century, from the reigns of
+James IV. and James V.; and in that period of Scottish literature
+alliteration not only blossomed but often overran and smothered the
+court poetry of the day. Alliterative lines and verses appear frequently
+in the ballads, but always with good taste, often with exquisite effect.
+What phrases are more familiar, more infused with the magic of the
+ballad-spirit, than the 'wan water,' the 'bent sae brown,' the 'lee
+licht o' the mune'? When the knight rides forth to see his true love, he
+mounts on his 'berry brown steed,' and 'fares o'er dale and down,' until
+he comes to the castle wa', where the lady sits 'sewing her silken
+seam.' He kisses her 'cheek and chin,' and she 'kilts her green kirtle,'
+and follows him; but not so fast as to outrun fate. In the oldest set
+of _The Battle of Otterburn_, alliteration asserts itself:
+
+    'The rae full reckless there sche runnes
+       To make the game and glee.'
+
+It is but seldom that the balladist avails himself so freely of the
+'artful aid' of this device as in _Johnie o' Braidislee_, the vigorous
+hunting lay that was a favourite with Carlyle's mother:
+
+    'Won up, won up, my good grey dogs,
+      Won up and be unboun';
+    For we maun awa' to Bride's braid wood,
+      To ding the dun deer doun, doun,
+              To ding the dun deer doun.'
+
+The words that have had the best chance of coming down to us intact on
+the stream of ballad-verse, or with only such marks of attrition and
+wear as might be caused by time and a rough channel, are those to which
+the popular mind of a later day has been unable to attach any definite
+meaning; for instance, certain names of places and houses, titles and
+functions, snatches of refrains, phrases reminiscent of otherwise
+forgotten primaeval or mediaeval customs and the like. These remain bedded
+like fossils in the more recent deposits, and form a curious study, for
+those who have time to enter into it, in the archaeology and palaeontology
+of the ballad. _Childe Rowland_, _Hynde Horn_, _Kempion_, furnish us
+with words, drawn from the language of Gothic and Norman chivalry, that
+must have dropped out of the common speech long before the ballads began
+to be regularly collected and printed. They recall the gentleness and
+courtesy, as well as the courage, that were supposed to be attributes of
+the 'most perfect goodly knight'--attributes in which, sooth to say, the
+typical knight of the Scottish ballad is not always a pattern.
+_Kempion_--'Kaempe' or Champion Owayne--is supposed to perpetuate the
+name of 'Owain-ap-Urien, King of Reged,' celebrated by Taliessin and the
+other early Welsh bards. And this is by no means the only instance in
+which ballads appear to have distilled the spirit and blended names and
+stories out of both Celtic and Teutonic legend. Thus _Glasgerion_, which
+in the best-known Scottish version has become _Glenkindie_, has been
+translated as _Glas-keraint_--Geraint, the Blue Bard--an Orpheus among
+the Brythons, whose chief legendary sites, according to Mr. Skene,
+Professor Rhys, and other authorities, are to be sought in Scotland and
+its borderlands. The fame of this harper, who, like Glenkindie, could
+'wile the fish from the flood,' came down to the times of Chaucer and
+Gavin Douglas, and was by them passed on; the former mentions him in his
+_House of Fame_ along with Chiron and Orion,
+
+    'And other Harpers many one,
+    With the Briton, Glasgerion.'
+
+It is not too much to conjecture that it was remembered also in popular
+poetry; and these and other classical writers of the Middle Ages, who
+despised not the common folk and their ways, no doubt drank deeply of
+knowledge and inspiration from the clear and hidden well of English
+poetry and romance even then existing in ballad lore. In fact, it seems
+as probable that the prose and metrical romances of chivalry have been
+derived from the folk-songs they resemble, as that the ballads have been
+borrowed from the romances; perhaps both owe their descent to a common
+and forgotten ancestor.
+
+Is it too much to believe that in our older ballads we hear the echoes
+of the voices--it may be the very words--of the old bards, the harpers
+and the minstrels, who sang in the ears of princes and people as far
+back as history can carry us? We know, by experience of other lands and
+races, from Samoa to Sicily, that are still in their earlier or later
+ballad-age, that the making of ballads is almost as old as the making of
+war or of love--that it long precedes letters, to say nothing of the
+printed page. It comes as natural for men to sing of the pangs of
+passion, or of the joys of victory, as to kiss or to fight. For untold
+generations the harps twanged in the hall, and the song of battle and
+the song of sorrow found eager listeners. All the while, the same tales,
+though perhaps in ruder and simpler guise, met with as warm a welcome in
+road and field and at country merrymaking. Trouvere and wandering
+minstrel, gleeman and eke gleemaiden, passed from place to place and
+from land to land repeating, altering, adapting the old stock of heroic
+or lovelorn ditties, or inventing new ones. They were a law unto
+themselves in other matters than metres; and had their own guilds, their
+own courts, and their own kings. The names of all but a few that
+chance, more than anything else, has preserved, have perished. But time
+may have been more tender than we know to their thoughts and words, or
+to their words and music, where these have been fitly wedded together.
+It may have saved for us some thrilling image as old as the time of the
+scalds, some scrap of melody which Ossian or Llywarch Hen but improved
+and handed on. The law of the conservation of force holds good in the
+world of poetry as well as in the physical world; and all that is
+dispersed and forgotten in ancient song is not lost. It is fused into
+the general stock of the nation's ideas and memories; and the richest
+and purest relics of it are perhaps to be sought in the Scottish
+ballads.
+
+The chroniclers who set down, often at inordinate and wearisome length,
+what was said and done in court or council or monastery did not wholly
+overlook the 'gospel of green fields' sung by the contemporary
+minstrels. But their notices are provokingly vague and unsatisfactory;
+no happy thought ever seems to have occurred to any monkish penman that
+he might earn more gratitude from posterity by collecting ballad verses
+than by copying the Legends of the Saints--so little can we guess what
+will be deemed of value by future ages. But in Scotland, as elsewhere,
+we have reason to believe that every event that deeply moved the popular
+mind gave rise to its crop of ballads, either freshly invented or worked
+up out of the old ballad stock. So sharply were incidents connected with
+the departure of a Scottish Princess, daughter of King Alexander III.,
+to be the bride of Eric of Norway, imprinted on people's minds that,
+according to Motherwell's calculation, the ballad of _Sir Patrick Spens_
+preserves the very days of the week when the expedition set sail and
+made the land:
+
+    'They hoisted their sails on a Mononday morn,
+      Wi' a' the speed they may,
+    And they have landed in Norawa'
+      Upon a Wodensday.'
+
+But this has the fault of proving too much. The last virtue that the
+ballad can claim is that of accuracy. With every desire to find proof
+and confirmation in the very calendar of the antiquity of this glorious
+old rhyme, one is disposed to suspect these dates to be a lucky hit; in
+fact, no sounder evidence than the correct enumeration of the daughters
+of George, fourth Earl of Huntly, in the old Aberdeenshire ballad:
+
+    'The Lord o' Gordon had three daughters,
+    Elizabeth, Margaret, and Jean,'
+
+which has led some Northern commentators to assume that its heroine was
+that Lady Jane Gordon whom Bothwell wronged and divorced, and who
+afterwards managed to console herself by marrying an Earl of Sutherland
+and a Lord Ogilvy of Boyne. The tragedy of the death of 'Alexander our
+King,' and the unnumbered woes that came in its train, was, as we know,
+celebrated in rhymes of which some scant salvage has come down to us;
+and the feats of William Wallace and the victories of the Bruce were
+rewarded by the maidens singing and the harpers harping in their
+praise. This we learn from a surer source than the ballads of the
+Wallace and Bruce Cycle that have been preserved, and that are neither
+the best of their kind nor of unquestioned authenticity. Blind Harry was
+himself of the ancient guild of the Minstrels, and gathered his
+materials at a date when the 'gude Sir William Wallace' was nearer his
+day than Prince Charlie is to our own. His poem is nothing other than
+floating ballads and traditional tales strung into epic form after the
+manner in which Pausanias is supposed to have pieced together the
+_Iliad_; indeed John Major, who in his childhood was contemporary with
+the Minstrel, tells us that he wrote down these 'native rhymes' and 'all
+that passed current among the people in his day,' and afterwards 'used
+to recite his tales in the households of the nobles, and thereby get the
+food and clothing that he deserved.'
+
+Then nothing could yield more convincing proof of the prevalence and
+popularity of the ballad in Scotland in the period of Chaucer--and
+nothing also could be more tantalising to the ballad-hunter--than
+Barbour's remark in his _Brus_, that it is needless for him to rehearse
+the tale of Sir John Soulis's victory over the English on the shores of
+Esk:
+
+    'For quha sa likis, thai may heir
+    Yong women, quhen they will play
+    Sing it emang thame ilka day.'
+
+The 'young women,' and likewise the old--bless them for it!--have
+always taken a foremost part in the singing and preservation of our old
+ballads, and even in the composing of them. Bannockburn set their quick
+brains working and their tongues wagging tunefully, in praise of their
+own heroes and in scorn of the English 'loons.' Aytoun quotes from the
+contemporary _St. Alban's Chronicle_ a stanza of a song, which (says the
+old writer) 'the maydens in that countree made on Kyng Edward; and in
+this manere they sang:
+
+    '"Maydens of Englande, sore may ye morne,
+    For ye have lost your lemans at Bannocksborne,
+                    With rombelogh."'
+
+Do not these jottings of grave fourteenth century churchmen, bred in the
+cell but having ears open to the din of the camp and the 'song of the
+maydens,' recall the exquisite words in _Twelfth Night_, that sum up the
+ballad at its best?
+
+                  'It is old and plain:
+    The spinsters and the knitters in the sun,
+    And the free maids that weave their thread with bones
+    Do use to chaunt it; it is silly sooth,
+    And dallies with the innocence of love
+    Like the old age.'
+
+In the long struggle with our 'auld enemies' of England that followed
+Bannockburn; in the quarrels between nobles and king; in the feuds of
+noble with noble and of laird with laird that continued for nearly three
+hundred years, themes and inspirations for the ballad muse came thick
+and fast. It was not alone, or chiefly, kingly doings and great national
+events that awakened the minstrel's voice and strings. Harpers and
+people had their favourite clans and names--a favour won most readily by
+those who were free both with purse and with sword. The Gordons of the
+North; and, in the South, Graemes, Scotts, Armstrongs, Douglases, are
+among the races that figure most prominently in ballad poetry. The great
+house of Douglas, in particular, is in the eyes and lips of romance and
+legend more honoured than the Stewarts themselves. The Douglas is the
+hero of both the Scottish and English versions of _Chevy Chase_. Hume of
+Godscroft, in his _History of the House of Angus_, written in 1644, has
+saved for us several scraps of traditional song celebrating the wrongs
+or the exploits of the Douglases, some of which must have originated at
+least as early as the second half of the fourteenth century, and can be
+identified in ballads that are extant and sung in the present day. One
+of them, quoted by Scott in his _Minstrelsy_, and times out of number
+since, unmistakably reveals the singer's sympathies. It is the verse
+that commemorates the treacherous slaughter of William, sixth Earl of
+Douglas, and his brother in 1440, by that great enemy of his race, James
+II., after the fatal 'black bull's head' had been set before them at the
+banquet to which they had been invited by the king:
+
+    'Edinburgh Castle, towne and toure,
+       God grant thou sink for sinne!
+    And that even for the black dinour
+       Erl Douglas gat therein.'
+
+Another records with glee the Douglas triumph when, in 1528, 'The Earl
+of Argyle had bound him to ride' into the Merse by the Pass of Pease,
+but was met and discomfited at 'Edgebucklin Brae.' In another, and much
+earlier fragment, recording how William Douglas the 'Knight of
+Liddesdale,' was met and slain by his kinsman, the Earl of Douglas, at
+the spot now known as Williamshope in Ettrick Forest, after the Countess
+had written letters to the doomed man 'to dissuade him from that
+hunting,' we may perhaps discover a germ of _Little Musgrave_, or trace
+situations and phrases that reappear in _The Douglas Tragedy_, _Gil
+Morice_, and their variants.
+
+In _Johnie Armstrong o' Gilnockie_, _The Border Widow_, and _The Sang of
+the Outlaw Murray_, also--in which we should perhaps see the reflection,
+in the popular mind of the day, of the efforts of James IV. and James V.
+to preserve order on the Borders--it is on the side of the freebooter
+rather than of the king and the law that our sympathies are enlisted.
+Indeed your balladist, like Allan Breck Stewart, was never a bigoted
+partisan of the law. There is ample proof in the writings of Sir David
+Lyndsay and others that in the first half of the sixteenth century a
+number of the Scottish ballads that have come down to us were already
+current and in high favour among the people, although they have not
+reached us in the shape in which they were then sung or recited.
+
+Long before this period, however, and on both sides of the Border, the
+status of the minstrel or ballad-maker--for in old times the two went
+together, or rather were blent in one, like the words and music--had
+suffered sad declension. There was no longer question of royal harpers
+or troubadours, as Alfred the Great and as Richard the Lion Heart had
+been in their hour of need; or even of bards and musicians held in high
+favour and honour by king and court, like Taillefer or Blondel. 'King's
+Minstrels' there were on both sides of Tweed, as is found from Exchequer
+and other records. But we suspect that these were players and singers of
+courtly and artificial lays. True, a poet of such genuine gifts as
+Dunbar had gone to London as the 'King's singer,' and had recited verses
+at a Lord Mayor's banquet that had tickled the ears of the worshipful
+aldermen and livery. But these could hardly have been the natural and
+spontaneous notes of the Muse of Scottish ballad poetry. The written and
+printed verse of the period had got overlaid and smothered by the
+flowers of ornament. As a French student of our literature has said,
+'The roses of these poets are splendid, but too full blown; they have
+expended all their strength, all their beauty, all their fragrance; no
+store of youth is left in them; they have given it all away.'
+
+As has happened repeatedly in our literary history, simplicity in art,
+as a source both of strength and of beauty, was almost forgotten; or its
+tradition was only remembered among the humble and nameless balladists.
+The only ones, says M. Jusserand, who escape the touch of decadence,
+are 'those unknown singers, chiefly in the region of the Scottish
+border, who derive their inspiration directly from the people'; who
+leave books alone and 'remodel ballads that will be remade after them,
+and come down to us stirring and touching,' like that ride of the Percy
+and the Douglas which, spite of his classic tastes, stirred the heart of
+the author of the _Art of Poesy_ 'like the sound of a trumpet.'
+
+Thus, like Antaeus, poetry sprang up again, fresh and strong, at the
+touch of its native earth; 'although declining in castles, it still
+thrilled with youth along the hedges and copses, in the woods and on the
+moors'; banished from court, it found refuge in the wilderness and sang
+at poor men's hearths and at rural fairs, where the King himself, if we
+may believe tradition, went out in romantic quest of it and of
+adventure, clad as a _gaberlunzie man_. In the _Complaynt of Scotland_,
+published in 1549, we have an enticing picture of the extent to which
+ballad lore and ballad music entered into the lives of the country
+people on the eve of the Reformation troubles. At the gatherings of the
+shepherds, old tales would be told, with or without stringed
+accompaniment--of _Gil Quheskher_ and _Sir Walter, the Bauld Leslye_,
+pieces now probably lost to us irrecoverably; of the familiar _Tayl of
+Yong Tamlane_; of _Robene Hude_ and _Litel Ihone_, whose fame, like that
+of the prophecies of Thomas of Ercildoune, had already been firmly
+established for a couple of centuries; of the _Red Etin_, whose place
+in folklore is well ascertained; and of the _Tayl of the Thre Vierd
+Systirs_, in which one can snuff the ingredients of the caldron in
+_Macbeth_. There were dances, founded on the same themes--_Robin Hood_,
+_Thom of Lyn_, and _Johnie Ermstrang_; and between whiles the women sang
+'sueit melodious sangis of natural music of the antiquite, such as _The
+Hunting of Cheviot_ and _The Red Harlaw_.' But of all this feast which
+he spreads in our sight, our author only lets us taste a morsel--a
+couple of lines taken apparently from a lost ballad on the fate of the
+Chevalier de la Beaute, rubbed down by the rough Scottish tongue to
+'Bawty,' at Billie Mire in 1517.
+
+The great religious and social upheaval that had already changed the
+face of England reached Scotland in a severer form. There was an escape
+of the _odium theologicum_ which always and everywhere is fatal to the
+tenderer flowers of poetry and romance. Men's minds were too deeply
+moved, and their hands too full to look upon ballads otherwise than
+askance and with disfavour. The Wedderburns and other zealous reformers
+set themselves to match the traditional and popular airs to 'Gude and
+Godlie Ballates' of their own invention. The wandering ballad-singer
+could no longer count on a welcome, either in the castles of the nobles
+or with the shepherds of the hills. Instead of getting, like Henry the
+Minstrel, his deserts in 'food and clothing,' these were apt to come to
+him in the shape of the stocks or the repentance-stool. He had lost
+caste and character, from causes for which he was not altogether
+responsible. An ill name had been given to him; and doubtless he often
+managed to merit it. His type, as it was found on both sides of the
+Border, is Autolycus, whom Shakespeare must often have met in the flesh
+about the 'footpath ways,' and at the rustic merrymakings of
+Warwickshire. Autolycus, too, has known the court, and has found his
+wares go out of fashion and favour with the great, and has to be content
+with cozening the ears and pockets of simple country folk. One cannot
+help liking the rogue, although he is as nimble with his fingers as with
+his tongue. He has the true balladist's love for freedom and sunshine
+and the open country. He will not be tied by rule; according to his
+moral law,
+
+    'When we wander here and there
+      We then do go most right.'
+
+His memory and his mouth, like his wallet, are full of snatches of
+ballads; and they cover a multitude of sins.
+
+Though no undoubted Scottish specimen was drawn from this pedlar's pack,
+we know, from the plays of the Elizabethan dramatists and other
+evidence, that Border minstrelsy had already raised echoes in London
+town, before King Jamie went thither with Scotland streaming in his
+train. During the last troublous half century of Scotland's history as
+an independent kingdom, the raw material of ballads was being
+manufactured as actively as at any period of her history, especially on
+the Borders and in the North. It may be called, indeed, the
+Moss-trooping Age, and the chief members of the Moss-trooping Cycle date
+from the latter years of the sixteenth century. _The Raid of the
+Reidswire_ happed in 1575; the expedition of _Jamie Telfer of the Fair
+Dodhead_ is conjecturally set down for 1582; _The Lads of Wamphray_
+commemorates a Dumfriesshire feud of the year 1593; while the more
+famous incident sung with immortal fire and vigour in _Kinmont Willie_
+took place in 1596. To the same period belong the exploits of _Dick of
+the Cow_ (who had made a name for himself in London while Elizabeth was
+on the throne), Archie of Ca'field, Hobbie Noble, Dickie of Dryhope, the
+Laird's Jock, John o' the Side, and other 'rank reivers,' whose title to
+the gallows is summed up in Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington's terse
+verse on the Liddesdale thieves; and their match in spulzying and
+fighting was to be found on the other side of the Esk and the Cheviot.
+
+With the Union of the Crowns, Sir Walter Scott half sadly reminds us in
+_Nigel_, one stream of Scottish romance and song ran dry; the end of the
+Kingdom became the middle of it; and as his namesake, Scott of Satchells
+puts it, the noble freebooter was degraded to be a common thief. But
+even the Reformation and the Union did not wipe out original sin or
+alter human nature. The kingdoms might have outwardly composed their
+quarrels; but private feuds remained, and even the Martyrs and the
+Covenanters had their relapses, and loved and sang and slew under the
+impulse of earthly passion. _The Dowie Dens o' Yarrow_--perhaps the
+most moving and most famous of the Scottish ballads--is supposed to have
+sprung, in its present shape at least, out of a tragic passage that
+occurred by that stream of sorrow so late as 1616.
+
+Away in the North, what we may call the ballad-yielding age, if it came
+later and had a less brilliant flowering time, endured longer. They had
+a fighting 'Border' there that lasted until the '45. The Gordons, of
+their own hand, have furnished a ballad literature as rich, if not quite
+so choice, as that of the Douglases themselves. _Glenlogie_ and
+_Geordie_ were of the 'gay Gordons,' and had the 'sprightly turn' that
+is held to be an inheritance of the race. _Edom o' Gordon_--Adam of
+Auchindoun--did his ruthless work in 1571. It was in one of their
+interminable quarrels, begun on the farther side of Spey, that, in the
+year 1592, the _Bonnie Earl o' Moray_ fell so far away as Donibristle,
+in Fife. The mystery of the _Burning of Frendraught_ took place in 1630;
+the tragedy of _Mill o' Tiftie's Annie_--one of the few dramas in which
+the balladist is content to take his characters from humble life--is
+dated, from the tombstone in Fyvie churchyard, in the year following,
+and is placed in Gordon country, and under the shadow of the Setons that
+became Gordons. _The Bonnie House o' Airlie_ treats of one of the
+incidents of the Civil War, and, for a wonder, in the true ballad
+fashion; and it turns, as the balladists are apt to do, a crooked and
+misliking look on the 'gleyed Argyll'; while that fine Deeside ballad,
+_The Baron o' Bracklay_, deals with an encounter between Farquharsons
+and Gordons in the period of the Restoration.
+
+After this, however, we hardly meet with a ballad having the antique
+ring about it, even on the Highland Line. The fine gold had become dim,
+or mixed with later clay. The mood and condition of the nation had
+changed. The 'end of the auld sang' of the Scottish Parliament was the
+end also of the ballad. There was an outburst of national feeling,
+expressed in song and music, over the Jacobite risings of last century;
+Allan Ramsay rose like a star at its beginning, and Burns shone out
+gloriously towards its close. But the expression was lyrical, and not
+narrative. The ballad of the old type no longer grew naturally and
+freshly by edge of copse and shaw. The collector had his eye upon it,
+and was already collecting, comparing, and classifying--and, what was
+worse, correcting, restoring, and improving.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+BALLAD STRUCTURE AND BALLAD STYLE
+
+    'Strike on, strike on, Glenkindie,
+      O' thy harping do not blinne,
+    For every stroke goes o'er thy harp,
+      It stounds my heart within.'
+
+        _Glenkindie._
+
+
+The old ballads were made to be sung; or, at least, to be chanted. An
+inquiry whether the traditional ballad airs preceded the words, or _vice
+versa_, would probably lead us to no more certain conclusions than that
+of whether the egg came before the fowl or the fowl before the egg. Both
+ballads and ballad airs have come down to us greatly changed and
+corrupted; and probably it is the airs that have suffered most from
+neglect and from alteration. Notation of the simple and plaintive and
+sweet old melodies appropriated in the ears and lips of the people to
+the words of particular ballads came long after the transcribing of the
+words themselves. There are other elements of perplexity and difficulty
+in ballad music which require an expert to unravel and explain, and
+which cannot be entered into here. The subject is referred to only
+because, in the eyes of the original composers and singers at least, to
+dissever the words from the tune would have seemed like parting soul
+from body; and because no right notion can be gathered of the Scottish
+ballads without bearing in mind the part which the ancient airs have
+taken in framing their structure and in moulding their style.
+
+Like the ballads themselves, the 'sets' of ballad airs vary with the
+localities; and even in the same district different airs will be found
+sung to the same words and different words to the same air. But of many
+of the older ballads, at least, it may be affirmed that, from time
+immemorial, they have been preserved in a certain musical setting which
+has not altered more in transmission from place to place and from
+generation to generation than have the ballads themselves, and which has
+so wrought itself into the texture and essence of the tale that it is
+impossible to think of them apart. The analogy of the Scottish psalmody
+may, perhaps, be used in illustration. In it, also, there is a 'common
+measure' that can be fitted at will to the common metre--in the psalms,
+as in the ballads, the alternation of lines of four and three accented
+syllables. In the one case, as in the other, there is a certain family
+resemblance, in the melody as in the theme, that to the untrained and
+unaccustomed ear may convey an impression of monotony. But to each
+ballad, as to each psalm, there belongs a peculiar strain or lilt,
+touched, as a rule, with a solemn or piercing pathos, often cast in the
+plaintive minor mode, that alone can bring out the full inner meaning
+of the words, and that is endeared and hallowed by centuries of
+association. As easily might we explain why the words and air of the
+'Old Hundredth' or the 'Old 124th' belong to each other, as analyse the
+wedded harmony of the verse and music in _The Broom o' the
+Cowdenknowes_, or _Barbara Allan_, or _The Bonnie House o' Airlie_.
+
+But not all, and not all the sweetest and the best of our ballad
+strains, are so firmly fixed in the memory as these; because, for one
+thing, they have not all enjoyed the same popularity of print. As a
+rule, and until this popularity comes, it may be taken that the greater
+the variations in tune and in words the greater the age. The late Dean
+Christie, of Fochabers, an enthusiastic hunter after 'Traditional Ballad
+Airs,' of which he found great treasure-trove in out-of-the-way nooks of
+Buchan, Enzie, and other districts of the north-eastern counties, tells
+us, from his experience, that 'the differences in the versions of the
+Romantic Ballads, as sung in the different counties, may be taken as a
+proof of their antiquity.' He had 'seldom heard two ballad-singers sing
+a ballad in the same way, either in words or music'; and he holds it
+'almost impossible to find the true set of any traditional air, unless
+the set can be traced genuinely to its composer,' a task, it need hardly
+be said, still more difficult than that of tracing the ballad words to
+the original balladist. It is also the opinion of this authority, that
+it is well-nigh impossible 'to arrange the traditional melodies without
+hearing them sung to the words of the ballad, the words and the air
+being so interwoven.' May it not be said, with equal truth, that those
+who know only the words of _Binnorie_, or _Chil' Ether_, or _The Twa
+Corbies_, and have never heard the strains, sweet and sad and weird,
+like the wind crooning at night round a ruined tower, to which it has
+been sung for untold generations, have not yet penetrated to the inmost
+soul of the ballad, or got a grasp of its formative principle?
+
+The refrain is a venerable and characteristic feature of the ballad and
+ballad melody. In its refrains, as in everything else, Scottish ballad
+poetry has been peculiarly happy. Some will have it that they are of
+much older date than the ballads themselves. It has been suggested that
+many of them--and these the refrains that have lost, if they ever
+possessed, any definite or intelligible meaning to the ear--may be
+relics not merely of ancient song, but of ancient rites and
+incantations, and of a forgotten speech. Attempts have been made to
+interpret, for instance, the familiar 'Down, down, derry down,' as a
+Celtic invocation to assemble at the hill of sacrifice--a survival of
+pagan times when the altars smoked with human victims. It need only be
+said that these ingenious theorists have not yet proved their case; and
+that the origin of the refrain is a subject involved in still greater
+obscurity than that of the ballad itself.
+
+Like the ballad verses and the ballad airs, also, these 'owerwords' are
+exceedingly variable, and are often interchangeable. Some of them are
+'owerwords' literally; that is to say, they simply repeat or echo a word
+or phrase of the stanza to which they are attached. A specimen is the
+verse from _Johnie o' Braidislee_, quoted in the previous chapter.
+Others, and these, as has been said, among the refrains of most ancient
+and honourable lineage, bear the appearance of words whose meaning has
+been forgotten. 'With rombelogh' has come rumbling down to us from the
+days of Bannockburn; and may even then have been of such eld that the
+key to its interpretation had already been lost. The 'Hey, nien-nanny'
+of the Scottish ballad was, under slightly different forms, old and
+quaint in Shakespeare's time, and in Chaucer's. Still others have the
+effect upon us of the rhyming prattle invented by children at play. They
+are cries, naive or wild, from the age of innocence--cries extracted
+from the children of nature by the beauty of the world or the sharp and
+relentless stroke of fate. Of such are 'The broom, the bonnie, bonnie
+broom,' 'Hey wi' the rose and the lindie o',' 'Blaw, blaw, ye cauld
+winds blaw,' and their congeners. These sweet and idyllic notes are
+often interposed in some of the very grimmest of our ballads. They
+suggest a harping interlude between lines that, without this relief,
+would be weighted with an intolerable load of horror or sorrow. There
+are refrain lines--'Bonnie St. Johnston stands fair upon Tay' is an
+example--which seem to hint that they may have been borrowed from some
+old ballad that, except for this preluding or interjected note, has
+utterly 'sunk dumb.' But more noticeable are those haunting burdens
+which, in certain moods, seem somehow to have absorbed more of the story
+than the ballad lines they accompany--that appeal to an inner sense with
+a directness and poignancy beyond the power of words to which we attach
+a coherent meaning. How deeply the sense of dread, of approaching
+tragedy, as well as that of colour and locality, is stimulated by the
+iteration of the drear owerword, 'All alone and alonie,' or 'Binnorie, O
+Binnorie!' How the horror of a monstrous crime creeps nearer with each
+repetition of the cry, 'Mither, Mither!' in the wild dialogue between
+mother and son in _Edward_! Like Glenkindie's harping, every stroke
+'stounds the heart within'--we scarce can tell how or why.
+
+Like the early Christians, the old balladists seem to have believed in
+community of goods. They had a kind of joint-stock of ideas, epithets,
+images; and freely borrowed and exchanged among themselves not merely
+refrains and single lines, but whole verses, passages, and situations.
+Always frugal in the employment of ornament in his text, the balladist
+never troubled to invent when he found a descriptive phrase or figure
+made and lying ready to his hand. Plagiarism from his brother bards was
+a thing that troubled him no more than repeating himself. He lived and
+sang in times before the literary conscience had been awakened or the
+literary canon had been laid down--or at least in places and among
+company where the fear of these, and of the critic, had never
+penetrated; and he borrowed, copied, adapted, without any sense of shame
+or remorse, because without any sense of sin. He has his conventional
+manner of opening, and his established formula for closing his tale. In
+portraiture, in scenery, in costume, he is simplicity itself. The
+heroine of the ballad, and, for that matter, the hero also, as a rule,
+must have 'yellow hair.' If she is not a Lady Maisry, it is a wonder if
+she be not a May Margaret or a Fair Annie, although there is also a
+goodly sprinkling of Janets, and Helens, and Marjories, and Barbaras in
+the enchanted land of ballad poetry. Sweet William has always been the
+favourite choice of the balladist, among the Christian names of the
+knightly wooers. Destiny presides over their first meeting. The king's
+daughters
+
+    'Cast kevils them amang,
+      To see who will to greenwood gang';
+
+and the lot falls upon the youngest and fairest--the youngest is always
+the fairest and most beloved in the ballad. The note of a bugle horn,
+and the pair see each other, and are made blessed and undone. Like Celia
+and Oliver in the Forest of Arden they no sooner look than they sigh;
+they no sooner sigh than they ask the reason; and as soon as they know
+the reason they apply the remedy. Or, mounted on 'high horseback,' the
+lover comes suddenly upon the lady among her sisters or her
+bower-maidens 'playin' at the ba'.'
+
+    'There were three ladies played at the ba',
+      Hey wi' the rose and the lindie O!
+    There cam' a knight and played o'er them a',
+      Where the primrose blooms so sweetly.
+
+    The knight he looted to a' the three,
+      Hey wi' the rose and the lindie O!
+    But to the youngest he bowed the knee
+      Where the primrose blooms so sweetly.'
+
+He sends messages that reach his true love's ear, through the guard of
+'bauld barons' and 'proud porters,' by his little footpage, who,
+
+    'When he came to broken brig,
+      He bent his bow and swam,
+    And when he came to grass growin',
+      Set down his feet and ran.
+
+    And when he came to the porter's yett,
+      Stayed neither to chap or ca',
+    But set his bent bow to his breast,
+      And lightly lap the wa'.'
+
+Or the knight comes himself to the bower door at witching and untimely
+hours--at 'the to-fa' o' the nicht,' or at the crowing of the 'red red
+cock'--and 'tirles at the pin.' But always treachery, in the shape of
+envious step-dame, angry brother, or false squire, is watching and
+listening. Six perils may go past, but the seventh is sure to strike its
+mark. Even should the course of true love run smoothly almost to the
+church door, something is sure to happen. Love is hot and swift as flame
+in the ballads, although it does not waste itself in honeyed phrases. It
+is quick to take offence; and at a hasty word the lovers start apart,
+
+    'Lord Thomas spoke a word in jest,
+      Fair Annet took it ill.'
+
+But more often the bolt comes out of the blue from another and jealous
+hand. The bride sets out richly apparelled and caparisoned to the tryst
+with the bridegroom. Her girdle is of gold and her skirts of the
+cramoisie. Four-and-twenty comely knights ride at her side, and
+four-and-twenty fair maidens in her train. The very hoofs of her steed
+are 'shod in front with the yellow gold and wi' siller shod behind.' To
+every teat of his mane is hung a silver bell, and,
+
+    'At every tift o' the norland win'
+      They tinkle ane by ane.'
+
+If the voyage is by sea,
+
+    'The masts are a' o' the beaten gold
+      And the sails o' the taffetie.'
+
+The old minstrel loved to linger over and repeat these details, and his
+audience, we may feel sure, never tired of hearing them. But they knew
+that calamity was coming, and would overtake bride and groom before they
+had gone, by sea or land,
+
+    'A league, a league,
+      A league, but barely three.'
+
+It might be in the shape of storm or flood. One ballad opens:
+
+    'Annan Water 's runnin' deep,
+      And my love Annie 's wondrous bonnie,'
+
+and afar off we see what is going to happen. But greater danger than
+from salt sea wave or 'frush saugh bush' is to be apprehended from the
+poisoned cup of the slighted rival or the dagger of the jealous brother.
+The knight had perhaps forgotten when he came courting his love to
+'spier at her brither John'; and when she stoops from horseback to kiss
+this sinister kinsman at parting, he thrusts his sword into her heart.
+The rosy face of the bride is wan, and her white bodice is full of blood
+when the gay bridegroom greets her, and he is left 'tearing his yellow
+hair.' More often, death itself does not sunder these lovers dear:
+
+    'Lady Margaret was dead lang e'er midnicht,
+      And Lord William lang e'er day.'
+
+And when they are buried, there springs up from their graves, as has
+happened in all the ballad lore and _maerchen_ of all the Aryan nations:
+
+    'Out of the one a bonnie rose bush,
+      And out o' the other a brier,'
+
+that 'met and pleat' in a true lovers' knot in emblem of the immortality
+of love, as love was in the olden time.
+
+These are all hackneyed phrases and incidents of the old balladists, the
+merest counters, borrowed, worn, and passed on through bards
+innumerable. But what fire and colour, what strength and pathos,
+continue to live in them! They smell of 'Flora and the fresh-delved
+earth'; they are redolent of the spring-time of human passion and
+thought. For the most part they belong to all ballad poetry, and not to
+the Scottish ballads alone. But there are other touches that seem to be
+peculiar to the genius of our own land and our own ballad literature;
+and, as has been said, one can with no great difficulty note the
+characteristic marks of the song of a particular district and even of an
+individual singer. The romantic ballads of the North, for example,
+although in no way behind those of the Border in strength and in
+tenderness, are commonly of rougher texture. They lack often the grace
+which, in the versions sung in the South, the minstrel knew how to
+combine with the manly vigour of his song; they are content with
+assonance where the other must have rhyme; and in many long and popular
+ballads, such as _Tiftie's Annie and Geordie_, there is scarcely so much
+as a good sound rhyme from beginning to end. One sometimes fancies that
+these Aberdonian ballads bear signs of being 'nirled' and toughened by
+the stress of the East Wind; they are true products of a keen, sharp
+climate working upon a deep and rich, but somewhat dour and stiff,
+historic soil.
+
+Whether they come from the north or the south side of Tay, whether they
+use up the traditional plots and phrases, or strike out an original line
+in the story and language, our ballads have all this precious quality,
+that they reflect transparently the manners and morals of their time,
+and human nature in all times. Their vast superiority, alike in truth
+and in beauty, over those imitations of them that were put forward last
+century as improvements upon the rude old lays, may best be seen,
+perhaps, by laying the old and the new 'set' of _Sir James the Rose_
+side by side, or comparing verse by verse David Mallet's much vaunted
+_William and Margaret_, with the beautiful old ballad, _There came a
+ghost to Marg'ret's door_. There is indeed no comparison. The changes
+made are nearly all either tinsel ornaments or mutilations of the
+traditional text, which an eighteenth century poetaster had sought to
+dress up to please the modish taste of the period. Nothing can be more
+out of key with the simple, direct, and graphic style of the Scottish
+ballads, dealing with elemental emotions and the situations arising
+therefrom, than a style founded on that of Pope, unless it be the style
+of the modern poet and romancist of the analytical and introspective
+school.
+
+If there ever be matter of offence in the traditional ballad, it resides
+in the theme and not in the handling and language. Whatever be its
+faults, it never has the taint of the vulgar; it avoids the suggestive
+with the same instinct with which it avoids the vapid adjective; it is
+the antithesis of the modern music-hall ditty. The balladist and his men
+and women speak straight to the point, and call a spade a spade.
+
+    'Ye lee, ye lee, ye leear loud,
+      Sae loud 's I hear ye lee,'
+
+and
+
+    'O wae betide you, ill woman,
+      And an ill death may ye dee,'
+
+are among the familiar courtesies of colloquy. In the telling of his
+tale, the minstrel puts off no time in preluding or introductory
+passages. In a single verse or couplet he has dashed into the middle of
+his theme, and his characters are already in dramatic parley, exchanging
+words like sword-thrusts. Take the opening of the immortal _Dowie Dens
+of Yarrow_, where the place, time, circumstances, and actors in the
+fatal quarrel are put swiftly before us in four lines:
+
+    'Late at e'en, drinking the wine,
+      And e'er they paid the lawin',
+    They set a combat them between,
+      To fight it e'er the dawin'.'
+
+Or still better example, the not less famous:
+
+    'The king sits in Dunfermline tower,
+      Drinking the blood-red wine.
+    Oh, where shall I find a skeely skipper
+      To sail this ship o' mine.'
+
+Or of _Sir James the Rose_:
+
+    'O, hae ye nae heard o' Sir James the Rose,
+      The young laird o' Balleichan,
+    How he has slain a gallant squire
+      Whose friends are out to take him!'
+
+Or in yet briefer space the whole materials of tragedy are given to us,
+as in that widely-known and multiform legend of the _Twa Sisters_ which
+Tennyson took as the basis of his _We were two daughters of one race_:
+
+    'He courted the eldest wi' glove and wi' ring,
+      Binnorie, O Binnorie!
+    But he loved the youngest aboon a' thing,
+      By the bonnie mill dams o' Binnorie.'
+
+Sometimes a brilliant or glowing picture is called up before our eyes by
+a stroke or two; as--
+
+    'The boy stared wild like a grey goshawk,'
+
+or
+
+    'The mantle that fair Annie wore
+      It skinkled in the sun';
+
+or
+
+    'And in at her bower window
+      The moon shone like a gleed';
+
+or
+
+    'O'er his white banes when they are bare
+    The wind shall sigh for evermair.'
+
+Or, to rise to the height of pity, despair, and terror to which the
+ballad strains of Scotland have reached, what master of modern realism
+has surpassed in trenchant and uncompromising power the passages in
+_Clerk Saunders_?--
+
+    'Then he drew forth his bright long brand,
+      And slait it on the strae,
+    And through Clerk Saunders' body
+      He 's gart cauld iron gae';
+
+and,
+
+    'She looked between her and the wa',
+      And dull and drumly were his een.'
+
+Has it ever happened, since the harp of Orpheus drew iron tears down
+Pluto's cheek, that ruth has taken so grim a form as that of _Edom o'
+Gordon_, as he turned over with his spear the body of his victim?
+
+            'O gin her breast was white;
+    "I might have spared that bonnie face
+      To be some man's delight."'
+
+Is there in the many pages of romance a climax so surprising, so
+overwhelming--a revelation that in its succinct and despairing candour
+goes so straight to the quick of human feeling--as that in the ballad of
+_Gil Morice_?--
+
+    '"I ance was as fu' o' Gil Morice
+      As the hip is wi' the stane."'
+
+To the fountainhead of our ballad-lore the great poets and romancists,
+from Chaucer to Shakespeare, and from Shakespeare to Wordsworth and
+Swinburne, and from Gavin Douglas to Burns and Scott and Stevenson, have
+gone for refreshment and new inspiration, when the world was weary and
+tame and sunk in the thraldom of the vulgar, the formal, and the
+commonplace; and never without receiving their rich reward and
+testifying their gratitude by fresh gifts of song and story, fresh
+harpings on the old lyre that moved the hearts of men to tears and
+laughter long before they knew of printed books. The old wellspring of
+music and poetry is still open to all, and has lost none of the old
+power of thrilling and enthralling; and the present is a time when a
+long and deep draught from the Scottish ballads seems specially required
+for the healing of a sick literature.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE MYTHOLOGICAL BALLAD
+
+    'Oh see ye not that bonnie road
+      That winds about yon fernie brae?
+    Oh that 's the road to fair Elfland
+      Where you and I this day maun gae.'
+
+        _Thomas the Rhymer._
+
+
+No scheme of ballad classification can be at all points complete and
+satisfactory. We have seen that it is impossible to classify the
+Scottish ballads according to authorship, since authors, known and
+proved, there are none. Scarce more practicable is it to arrange them in
+any regular order of chronology or locality; and even when we seek to
+group them with regard to type and subject, difficulties start up at
+every step. A convenient and intelligible division would seem to be one
+that recognised the ballads as Mythological, Romantic, or Historical,
+this last class including the lays of the foray and the chase, that
+cannot be assigned to any particular date--that cannot, indeed, be
+proved to have any historical basis at all--but can yet, with more or
+less of probability, be assigned to some historical or _quasi_-historical
+character. Besides these, there are groups of ballads that cannot be
+wholly overlooked--ballads in which, contrary to the prevailing spirit
+of this kind of poetry, Humour asserts itself as an essential element;
+ballads of the Sea; and Peasant ballads, of which, perhaps, England
+yields happier examples than Scotland--simple rustic ditties, hawked
+about in broad-sheets, and dating, many of them, no earlier than the
+present century, that seldom rise much above the doggerel and
+commonplace, and do not, as a rule, concern themselves with the high
+personages and high-strung passions of the ballad of Old Romance.
+
+No well-defined frontier can be laid down between the three chief
+departments of ballad minstrelsy. The pieces in which fairy-lore and
+ancient superstition have a prominent place--the ballads of Myth and
+Marvel--have all of them a strong romantic colouring; and the like may
+be said of the traditional songs of war and of raiding and hunting, as
+well as of those whose theme is the passion and tragedy of love.
+Romance, indeed, is the animating soul of the body of Scottish ballad
+poetry; the note that gives it unity and distinguishes it from mere
+versified history and folklore. There are few ballads on which some
+shadow out of the World Invisible is not cast; few where ill-happed love
+is not a master-string of the minstrel's harp; few into which there does
+not come strife and the flash of cold steel. Natheless, a broad division
+into ballads Supernatural, Romantic, and Martial has reason as well as
+convenience to recommend it; and in a loose and general way such an
+arrangement should also indicate the comparative age, not indeed of the
+ballad versions as we know them, but of the ideas and materials of which
+they are composed.
+
+First, then, of the ballads that are steeped in the element of the
+supernatural, let it be remembered that it is well-nigh impossible for
+us in these days, when we have cleared about us a little island of light
+in the darkness, to understand the atmosphere of mystery that pressed
+close around the life of man in the age when the ballad had its birth.
+The Unknown and the Unseen surrounded him on every side. He could
+scarcely put forth a hand without touching things that were not of this
+world; and in proportion to the ignorance was the fear. Through the long
+twilight in which the primaeval beliefs and superstitions grew up and
+became embodied in legend and custom, in _maerchen_ and ballad, and all
+through the Middle Ages, man's pilgrimage on earth was indeed through a
+Valley of the Shadow. It was a narrow way, between 'the Ditch and the
+Quag, and past the very mouth of the Pit,' full of frightful sights and
+dreadful noises, of hobgoblins, and dragons, and chimeras dire. Tales
+that have ceased to frighten the nursery, that we listen to with a smile
+or at most with a pleasant stirring of the blood and titillation of the
+nerves, once on a time were the terror of grown men. The ogres and
+dragons of old are dead, and the Folklorist and the Comparative
+Mythologist make free of their caves, and are busy setting up,
+comparing, classifying, and labelling their skeletons for the
+instruction of an age of science. But there was a time when the wisest
+believed in their existence as an article of faith, and when the boldest
+shuddered to hear them named. What are now idle fancies were once the
+most portentous of realities; and in this lies the secret of the almost
+universal diffusion of certain typical tales, beliefs, and observances,
+and of the fascination which they have not ceased to exercise over the
+imagination of mankind.
+
+Into the subject of the origins, the relationships, and the
+signification of these venerable traditions and superstitions of the
+race and of all races, there is neither time nor occasion for entering.
+This oldest and yet last found of the realms of science is as yet only
+in course of being surveyed, and from day to day fresh discoveries are
+announced by the eager explorers of the darkling provinces of myth and
+folktale. But this at least may be said, that not in the wide domain of
+popular saga and poetry can there be reaped a richer or more varied
+harvest of weird and wild and beautiful fancies, touched by the light
+that 'never was on sea or land,' than is to be found in the Scottish
+ballads.
+
+From among them one could gather out a whole menagerie of the 'selcouth'
+beasts and birds and creeping things that have been banished from solid
+earth into the limbo of Faery and Romance. They furnish examples of
+nearly all the root-ideas and typical tales which folklorists have
+discovered in the vast jungle of popular legends and superstitions--the
+Supernatural Birth, the Life and Faith Tokens, the Dragon Slayer, the
+Mermaid and the Despised Sister, Bluebeard of the Many Wives, the Well
+of Healing, the Magic Mirror, the Enchanted Horn, the Singing Bone, the
+Babes in the Wood, the Blabbing Popinjay, the Counterpart, the
+Transformation, the Spell, the Prophecy, the Riddle, the Return from the
+Grave, the Dead Ride, the Demon Lover, the Captivity in Faeryland, the
+Seven Years' Kain to Hell, and a host of others.
+
+Certain of them, like _Thomas the Rhymer_ and _Young Tamlane_, are
+'fulfilled all of Faery.' One can read in them how deeply the old
+superstition, which some would attribute to a traditional memory of the
+pre-Aryan inhabitants of Western Europe--to the 'barrow-wights,'
+pigmies, or Pechts who dwelt in or were driven for shelter to caves and
+other underground dwellings of the land--had struck its roots in the
+popular fancy. Probably Mr. Andrew Lang carries us as far as we can go
+at present in the search for origins and affinities, when he says that
+the belief in fairies, and in their relatives, the gnomes and brownies,
+is 'a complex matter, from which tradition, with its memory of
+earth-dwellers, is not wholly absent, while more is due to a survival of
+the pre-Christian Hades, and to the belief in local spirits--the Vius of
+Melanesia, the Nereids of ancient and modern Greece, the Lares of Rome,
+the fateful Maerae and Hathors--old imaginings of a world not yet
+dispeopled of its dreams.' The elfin-folk of the Scottish ballads have
+some few traits that are local and national; but, on the whole, they
+conform pretty closely to a type that has now become well marked in the
+literature as well as in the popular beliefs of European countries. The
+fairies have been, among the orders of supernatural beings, the pets and
+favourites of the poets, who have heaped their flowers of fancy above
+the graves of the departed Little Folk. We suspect that the more
+graceful and gracious touches in the Fairy Ballad are the renovating
+work of later hands than the elder balladist; and in the two typical
+Scottish examples that have been mentioned, it is not difficult to find
+the mark of Sir Walter.
+
+In the time when fairies still tripped the moonlit sward, they received
+praise and compliment indeed from the mouths of their human kin, but it
+was more out of fear than out of love. They were the 'Men of Peace' and
+the 'Good Neighbours' for a reason not much different from that which
+caused the Devil's share in the churchyard to be known as the 'Guid
+Man's Croft,' lest by speaking more frankly of those having power, evil
+might befall. The tenancy of brake and woodland in the 'witching hours'
+by this uncanny people was a formidable addition to the terrors of the
+night:
+
+    'Up the craggy mountain
+      And down the rushy glen,
+    We dare not go a-hunting
+      For fear of Little Men.
+
+    Wee folk, good folk,
+      Trooping altogether,
+    Green jerkin, red cap,
+      And white owl's feather.'
+
+They were tricksy, capricious, peevish, easily offended, malicious if
+not wholly malevolent, and dangerous alike to trust and to thwart. All
+this, together with their habit of trooping in procession and dancing
+under the moon; their practice of snatching away to their underground
+abodes those who, by kiss or other spell, fall into their hands; and the
+penance or sacrifice which at every seven years' term they pay to powers
+still more dread, comes out in the tale of True Thomas's adventure with
+the Queen of Faery, and in Fair Janet's ordeal to win back Young Tamlane
+to earth. Their prodigious strength, so strangely disproportioned to
+their size, is celebrated in the quaint lines of _The Wee Wee Man_;
+while from _The Elfin Knight_ we learn that woman's wit as well as
+woman's faith can, on occasion, prove a match for all the spells and
+riddles of fairyland. The enchanted horn is heard blowing--
+
+    'A knight stands on yon high, high hill,
+      Blaw, blaw, ye cauld winds blaw!
+    He blaws a blast baith loud and shrill,
+      The cauld wind 's blawn my plaid awa,'
+
+and, at the spoken wish, the Elfin Knight is at the maiden's side. But
+the spell the tongue has woven, the tongue can unloose; and the lady
+brings her unearthly lover first into captivity by setting him a
+preliminary task to perform, more baffling than that 'sewing a sark
+without a seam.'
+
+It is otherwise with True Thomas, as it was with Merlin before him, and
+with all the men, wise and foolish, who have once yielded to the
+glamourie of the Elfin Queen and others of her type and sex. The Rhymer
+of Ercildoune was probably only a man more learned and far-seeing than
+others of his time. His reputation for Second Sight may rest upon a
+basis similar to that which led the mediaeval mind to dub Virgil a
+magician, and to recognise the wizard in Sir Michael Scott, the grave
+ambassador and counsellor of kings, and, at a later date, enabled the
+profane vulgar to discover a baronet of Gordonstoun to be a warlock, for
+no better reason than because, with the encouragement of that most
+indefatigable of ballad collectors, Samuel Pepys, he gave his attention
+to the perfecting of sea-pumps for the royal navy. Whether the Rhymer's
+expedition to Fairyland was feigned by the balladist to explain his
+soothsaying; or whether, rather, his prophecies were invented as
+evidence of the perilous gift he brought back with him from Elfland,
+research will never be able to tell us. But the journey True Thomas made
+on the fateful day when, lying on Huntlie bank,
+
+    'A ferlie he spied wi' his e'e;
+      And there he saw a ladye bright
+    Come riding down by the Eildon Tree,'
+
+was one that many heroes of adventure, before him and after him, have
+made in fairy lands forlorn. The scenery and incidents of that strange
+ride are also among the common possessions of fairy romance. One dimly
+discerns in them the glimmer of an ancient allegory, of an old
+cosmogony, that may possibly be derived from the very infancy of the
+world, when human thought began to brood over the mysteries of life and
+time. There are the Broad Path of Wickedness and the Narrow Way of
+Right, and between them that 'bonnie road' of Fantasy, winding and
+fern-sown, that leads to 'fair Elfland.' There is a glimpse of the
+Garden of the Hesperides and its fruits; and a lurid peep into Hades:
+
+    'It was mirk, mirk nicht and nae starlicht,
+      And they waded through red bluid to the knee;
+    For a' the bluid that 's shed on earth
+      Rins through the springs o' that countrie.'
+
+The Palace of Truth as well as of Error is built on fairy ground; and
+there is a foretaste of Gilbertian humour in the dismay with which the
+Rhymer hears that he is to be endowed with 'the tongue that can never
+lie.'
+
+    '"My tongue is mine ain," True Thomas said;
+      "A goodlie gift you would give me;
+    I neither dought to buy or sell
+      At fair or tryst where I may be;
+    I dought neither speak to prince or peer
+      Nor ask of grace from fair ladye."'
+
+But from his seven years' wanderings in fairyland, that speed like a day
+upon earth, he wakens up as from a dream, and again he is laid on
+Huntlie bank, in sight of the cleft Eildon.
+
+Is it not significant that Melrose and Abbotsford, where a later and
+greater wizard wrought his spells over the valley of the Tweed and
+Ettrick Forest, should be half-way between the chief scenes of our Fairy
+Ballads--between the Rhymer's Tower and Carterhaugh? Fair Janet's
+conduct, when forbidden to come or go by Carterhaugh, where Yarrow holds
+tryst with Ettrick, lest she might encounter the Young Tamlane, may be
+traced back to the Garden of Eden, and is of a piece with that of Mother
+Eve:
+
+    'Janet has kilted her green kirtle
+      A little abune her knee;
+    And she has braided her yellow hair
+      A little abune her bree;
+    And she 's awa' to Carterhaugh
+      As fast as she could gae.'
+
+There she falls in with the 'elfin grey' who might have been an 'earthly
+knight'; and he tells her how, as a youth, he had been reft away to
+fairyland:
+
+    'There cam' a wind out o' the north,
+      A sharp wind and a snell;
+    A deep sleep cam' over me
+      And from my horse I fell';
+
+as happened to 'Held Harald' and his men in the German legend. But he
+also tells her how, by waiting at the cross road at midnight on
+Halloweve, 'when fairy folk do ride,' she may win back the father of her
+child to mortal shape. That waiting on the dreary heath while 'a north
+wind tore the bent,' and what followed, become the ordeal of Janet's
+love:
+
+    'Aboot the dead hour o' the night
+      She heard the bridles ring;
+    And Janet was as glad o' that
+      As any earthly thing.
+
+    And first gaed by the black, black steed,
+      And then gaed by the brown,
+    But fast she gripped the milk-white steed
+      And pu'ed the rider down';
+
+and holding her lover fast, through all his gruesome changes of form,
+she 'borrowed' him from the 'seely court,' and saved him from becoming
+the tribute paid every seven years to the powers that held fairydom in
+vassalage.
+
+Another series of transmutations, familiar in ballad and folklore, is
+that in which the powers of White and Black Magic strive for the
+mastery, generally to the discomfiture of the latter, after the manner
+of the Hunting of Paupukewis in _Hiawatha_. The baffled magician or
+witch--often the mother-in-law or stepmother, the stock villain of the
+piece in these old tales--alters her shape rapidly to living creature or
+inanimate thing; but fast as she changes the avenger also changes,
+pursues, and at length destroys. In the ballad of _The Twa Magicians_,
+given in Buchan's collection, it is virtue that flees, and wrong, in the
+shape of a Smith, of Weyland's mystic kin, that follows and overcomes.
+
+But, as a rule, the transformations that are made the subject of the
+Scottish ballads are of a more lasting kind; the prince or princess,
+tempted by a kiss, or at the touch of enchanted wand or ring, is doomed
+for a time to crawl in the loathly shape of snake or dragon about a
+tree, or swim the waters as mermaid or other monstrous brood of the seas
+of romance, until the appointed time when the deliverer comes, and by
+like magic art, or by the pure force of courage and love, looses the
+spell. _Kempion_ is a type of a class of story that runs, in many
+variations, through the romances of chivalry, and from these may have
+been passed down to the ballad-singer, although ruder forms of it are
+common to nearly all folk-mythology. The hero is one of those kings'
+sons, who, along with kings' daughters, people the literature of ballad
+and _maerchen_; and he has heard of the 'heavy weird' that has been laid
+upon a lady to haunt the flood around the Estmere Crags as a 'fiery
+beast.' He is dared to lean over the cliff and kiss this hideous
+creature; and at the third kiss she turns into
+
+    'The loveliest ladye e'er could be.'
+
+The rescuer asks--
+
+    'O, was it wehrwolf in the wood,
+      Or was it mermaid in the sea?
+    Or was it man, or vile woman,
+      My ain true love, that misshaped thee?'
+
+Nor do we wonder to hear that it was the doing of the wicked and envious
+stepmother, on whom there straight falls a worse and a well-deserved
+weird. In _King Henrie_, too, it is the stepdame that has wrought the
+mischief. He is lying 'burd alane' in his hunting hall in the forest,
+when his grey dogs cringe and whine; the door is burst in, and
+
+          'A grisly ghost
+    Stands stamping on the floor.'
+
+The manners of this _Poltergeist_ are in keeping with her rough entrance
+on the scene; her ogreish appetite is not satisfied even when she had
+devoured his hounds, his hawks, and his steed. As in the _Wife of Bath's
+Tale_, and the _Marriage of Sir Gawain_ and other legends of the same
+type, the knight's courtesy withstands every test, and he is rewarded
+for having given the lady her will:
+
+    'When day was come and night was gane
+      And the sun shone through the ha',
+    The fairest ladye that e'er was seen
+      Lay between him and the wa'.'
+
+In most cases it is not wise or safe to give entertainment to these
+wanderers of the night, whether they come in fair shape or in foul. They
+are apt to prove to be of the race of the _succubi_, from whom a kiss
+means death or worse. More than one of our Scottish ballads are
+reminiscent of the beautiful old Breton lay, _The Lord Nann_, so
+admirably translated by Tom Taylor, wherein the young husband, stricken
+to the heart by the baleful kiss given to him against his will by a
+wood-nymph, goes home to die, and his fair young wife follows him fast
+to the grave. _Alison Gross_ is another of those Circes who, by
+incantation of horn and wand, seek to lower the shape and nature of her
+lovers to those of the beasts that crawl on their bellies. Sometimes the
+tempter is of the other sex. Thus _The Demon Lover_ is a tale known in
+several versions in Scotland, and lately brought under notice by Mr.
+Hall Caine in its Manx form. The frail lady is enticed from her home,
+and induced to put foot on board the mysterious ship by an appeal, a
+pathetic echo of which has lingered on in later poetry, and has been
+quoted as the very dirge of the Lost Cause:
+
+    'He turned him right and round about,
+      And the tear blindit his e'e;
+    "I would never have trodden on Irish ground
+      If it hadna been for thee."'
+
+They have not sailed far, when his countenance changes, and he grows to
+a monstrous stature; the foul fiend is revealed. They are bound on a
+drearier voyage than that of True Thomas--to a Hades of ice and
+isolation that bespeaks the northern origin of the tale:
+
+    '"O whaten a mountain 's yon," she said,
+      "So dreary wi' frost and snow?"
+    "O yon 's the mountain of hell," he cried,
+      "Where you and I must go."
+
+    He strack the tapmast wi' his hand,
+      The foremast wi' his knee;
+    And he brake the gallant ship in twain
+      And sank her in the sea.'
+
+Other spells and charms not a few, for the winning of love and the
+slaking of revenge, are known to the old balladists. We hear of the
+compelling or sundering power of the bright red gold and the cold steel.
+Lovers at parting exchange rings, as in _Hynd Horn_, gifted with the
+property of revealing death or faithlessness:
+
+    'When your ring turns pale and wan,
+    Then I 'm in love wi' another man.'
+
+Or, as in _Rose the Red and Lily Flower_, it is a magic horn, to be
+blown when in danger, and whose notes can be heard at any distance.
+These are examples of the 'Life Token' and the 'Faith Token,' known to
+the folklore of nearly all peoples who have preserved fragments of their
+primitive beliefs. The prophetic power of dreams is revealed in _The
+Drowned Lovers_, in _Child Rowland_, in _Annie of Lochryan_, and in a
+host of others. The spells used by witchcraft to arrest birth do not
+differ greatly in _Willie's Lady_--the 'nine witch-knots,' the 'bush of
+woodbine,' the 'kaims o' care,' and the 'master goat'--from those
+mentioned in its prototypes in Scandinavian, Greek, and Eastern ballads
+and stories; and in more than one it is the sage counsels of 'Billy
+Blin''--the Brownie--that give the cue by which the evil charm is
+unwound. The Brownie--the Lubber Fiend--owns a department of legend and
+ballad scarcely less important than that possessed by his relatives, the
+Elfin folk and the Trolds; a shy and clumsy monster, but harmless and
+good-natured, and with a turn for hard manual labour that can be turned
+to useful account. Good and ill fortune, in the ballads, comes often by
+lot:
+
+    'We were sisters, sisters seven,
+      Bowing down, bowing down;
+    The fairest maidens under heaven;
+      And aye the birks a' bowing.
+
+    And we keest kevils us amang,
+      Bowing down, bowing down;
+    To see who would to greenwood gang,
+      And aye the birks a' bowing.'
+
+The birk held a high place in the secret rites and customs of the Ballad
+Age. It was with 'a wand o' the bonnie birk' that May Margaret went
+through the mysterious process of restoring her plighted troth to Clerk
+Saunders; in other ballads it is done by passes of the hand, or of a
+crystal rod. When the 'Clerk's Twa Sons o' Owsenford' were brought back
+to earth by their mother's bitter grief and longing, they wore 'hats
+made o' the birk':
+
+    'It neither grew in syke or ditch,
+      Nor yet in ony sheugh;
+    But at the gate of Paradise
+      That birk grew green eneuch.'
+
+Birds of the air carry a secret; there are tongues in trees that
+syllable men's names; and even inanimate things cry aloud with the voice
+of Remorse or of Doom. When the knight wishes to send a message, he
+speaks in the ear of his 'gay goshawk that can baith speak and flee.'
+When May Colvin returns home after the fatal meeting at the well, where
+her seven predecessors in the love of the 'Fause Sir John' had been
+drowned, the 'wylie parrot' speaks the words that were no doubt ringing
+in her brain:
+
+    'What hae ye made o' the fause Sir John
+      That ye gaed wi' yestreen?'
+
+And in _Earl Richard_ and other ballads, it is the 'popinjay' that
+proclaims guilt or fear from turret or tree. One remembers also 'Proud
+Maisie' walking early in the wood, and Sweet Robin piping her doom among
+the green summer leaves:
+
+    '"Tell me, my bonnie bird,
+      When shall I marry me?"
+    "When six braw gentlemen
+      Kirkward shall carry thee"';
+
+and the 'Three Corbies' croaking the most grim and dismal notes in all
+the wide, wild range of ballad poetry, as they feast on the new-slain
+knight:
+
+    'Ye 'll sit on his white hause bane,
+    And I 'll pike oot his bonnie blue een;
+    Wi' ae lock o' his yellow hair
+    We 'll theak our nest when it is bare.
+
+    O mony a ane for him maks mane,
+    But nae ane kens whaur he is gane,
+    O'er his white banes when they are bare
+    The wind shall sigh for evermair.'
+
+But things that have neither sense nor life utter aloud words of menace
+and accusation. Lord Barnard's horn makes the forest echo with the
+warning notes, 'Away, Musgrave, away!' _Binnorie_ embalms the tradition
+of the 'singing bone' which pervades the folklore of the Aryan peoples,
+and is found also in China and among the negro tribes of West Africa. A
+harper finds the body of the drowned sister, and out of her
+'breast-bane' he forms a harp which he strings with her yellow hair.
+According to a northern version of the ballad, he makes a plectrum from
+'a lith of her finger bane.' On this strange instrument the minstrel
+plays before king and court, and the strings sigh forth:
+
+    'Wae to my sister, fair Helen!'
+
+In other ballads, the yearning or remorse of the living draw the dead
+from their graves. In the tale of _The Cruel Mother_, we seem to see the
+workings of the guilty conscience, which at length 'visualised' the
+victims of unnatural murder. The bride goes alone to the bonnie
+greenwood, to bear and to slay her twin children:
+
+    'She 's wrapped her mantle about her head,
+      All alone, and alonie O!
+    She 's gone to do a fearful deed
+      Down by the greenwood bonnie O!'
+
+The crime and shame are hid; but peace does not come to her:
+
+    'The lady looked o'er her high castle wa',
+      All alone and alonie O!
+    She saw twa bonnie bairnies play at the ba'
+      Down by yon greenwood bonnie O!
+
+The mother's yearning awakens within her, and she promises them all
+manner of gifts if they will only be hers. But the voices of the
+ghost-children rise and pronounce judgment on her:
+
+    'O cruel mither, when we were thine,
+      All alone and alonie O!
+    From us ye did our young lives twine,
+      Doon by yon greenwood bonnie O.'
+
+Elsewhere in these old rhymes may be traced a superstitious belief,
+which was put in practice as a means of discovering guilt, at least as
+late as the middle of the seventeenth century--that of the Ordeal by
+Touch. In _Young Benjie_ another test is applied to find the murderer;
+and at midnight the door of the death-chamber is set ajar, so that the
+wandering spirit may enter and reanimate for an hour the 'streikit
+corpse':
+
+    'About the middle of the night
+      The cocks began to craw;
+    And at the dead hour o' the night,
+      The corpse began to thraw.'
+
+It sat up; and with its dead lips told the waiting brethren on whose
+head justice, tempered with a strange streak of mercy, should fall for
+the foul slaughter of their 'ae sister':
+
+    'Ye maunna Benjie head, brothers,
+      Ye maunna Benjie hang,
+    But ye maun pyke oot his twa grey een
+      Before ye let him gang.'
+
+In _Proud Lady Margaret_, again, we have a form of the legend, told in
+many lands, and made familiar, in a milder form, by the classical German
+ballad of _The Lady of the Kynast_, of a haughty and cruel dame whose
+riddles are answered and whose heart is at length won by a stranger
+knight. She would fain ride home with him, but he answers her that he is
+her brother Willie, come from the other side of death to 'humble her
+haughty heart has gart sae mony dee':
+
+    'The wee worms are my bedfellows
+    And cauld clay is my sheets';
+
+and there is no room in his narrow house for other company. Out of the
+Dark Country, too, on a similar errand, on Hallowe'en night, rides the
+betrayed and slain knight in _Child Rowland_, the first line of which,
+preserved in _King Lear_ as it was known in Shakespeare's day, seems to
+strike a keynote of ballad romance:
+
+    'Child Rowland to the dark tower came,'
+
+mumbles the feigned madman in the ear of the poor wronged king as they
+tread the waste heath. And the sequel, as it has come down to us,
+sustains and strengthens the spell of the opening:
+
+      'And he tirled at the pin;
+    And wha sae ready as his fause love,
+      To rise and let him in.'
+
+The passages that describe the haunted ride in the moonlight, when the
+lady has fled from the scene of her treachery and guilt, are not
+surpassed in weird imaginative power, if they are equalled, by anything
+in ballad or other literature:
+
+    'She hadna ridden a mile, a mile,
+      Never a mile but ane,
+    When she was 'ware o' a tall young man
+      Riding slowly o'er the plain.
+    She turned her to the right about,
+      And to the left turned she;
+    But aye 'tween her and the wan moonlight
+      That tall knight did she see.'
+
+She set whip and spur to her steed, but 'nae nearer could she get'; she
+appealed to him, as from a 'saikless,' or guiltless, maid to 'a leal
+true knight,' to draw his bridle-rein until she can come up with him:
+
+    'But nothing did that tall knight say,
+      And nothing did he blin;
+    Still slowly rade he on before,
+      And fast she rade behind,'
+
+until he drew rein at a broad river-side. Then he spoke:
+
+    '"This water it is deep," he said,
+      "As it is wondrous dun;
+    But it is sic as a saikless maid,
+      And a leal true knight can swim."'
+
+They plunged in together, and the flood bore them down:
+
+    '"The water is waxing deeper still,
+      Sae does it wax mair wide;
+    And aye the farther we ride on,
+      Farther off is the other side."
+
+           .       .       .       .       .
+
+    The knight turned slowly round about
+      All in the middle stream,
+    He stretched out his hand to that lady,
+      And loudly she did scream.
+
+    "O, this is Hallow-morn," he said,
+      "And it is your bridal day;
+    But sad would be that gay wedding
+      Were bridegroom and bride away.
+    But ride on, ride on, proud Margaret,
+      Till the water comes o'er your bree;
+    For the bride maun ride deep and deeper yet
+      Who rides this ford wi' me."'
+
+But the perturbed spirit does not always thus revisit the glimpses of
+the moon to awaken conscience, to humble pride, or to wreak vengeance.
+More often it is the repinings and longings of passionate love that keep
+it from its rest. In _maerchen_ and ballad the ghost of the lover comes
+to complain that the tears which his betrothed sheds nightly fill his
+shroud with blood; when she smiles, it is filled with rose leaves. The
+mother steals from the grave to hap and comfort her orphan children;
+their harsh stepmother neglects and ill-treats them, and their exceeding
+bitter and desolate cry has penetrated beneath the sod, and reached the
+dead ear. In _The Clerk's Sons o' Owsenford_, and in that singular
+fragment of the same creepy theme, recovered by Scott, _The Wife of
+Usher's Well_, it is the yearning of the living mother that brings the
+dead sons back to their home:
+
+    '"Blaw up the fire, my maidens,
+      Bring water from the well!
+    For a' my house shall feast this nicht,
+      Since my three sons are well."'
+
+The _revenants_, silent guests with staring eyes, wait and warm
+themselves by the fireside, while the 'carline wife' ministers to their
+wants, and spreads her 'gay mantle' over them to keep them from the
+cold, until their time comes:
+
+    '"The cock doth craw, the day doth daw,
+      The channerin' worm doth chide;
+    Gin we be missed out o' our place
+      A sair pain we must bide."
+
+    "Lie still, be still a little wee while,
+      Lie still but if we may;
+    Gin my mother should miss us when she wakes,
+      She 'll gae mad, ere it be day."
+
+    O it 's they 've taen up their mother's mantle,
+      And they 've hung it on a pin;
+    "O lang may ye hing, my mother's mantle,
+      Ere ye hap us again."'
+
+A chill air as from the charnel-house seems to breathe upon us while
+reading the lines; the coldness, the darkness, and the horror of death
+have never been painted for us with more terrible power than in the
+'Wiertz Gallery' of the old balladists.
+
+We feel this also in the ballads of the type of _Sweet William and May
+Margaret_, quoted in Beaumont and Fletcher's _Knight of the Burning
+Pestle_, where the dead returns to claim back a plighted word; and at
+the same time we feel the strength of the perfect love that triumphs
+over death and casts out fear:
+
+    '"Is there any room at your head, Willie,
+      Or any room at your feet,
+    Or any room at your side, Willie,
+      Wherein that I may creep?"'
+
+How miserably the poetical taste of the early part of last century
+misappreciated the spirit of the ancient ballad, preferring the dross to
+the fine gold, and tricking out the 'terrific old Scottish tale,' as
+Sir Walter Scott calls it, in meretricious ornament, may be seen by
+comparing the original copies with that 'elegant' composition of David
+Mallet, _William and Margaret_, so praised and popular in its day, in
+which every change made is a disfigurement of the nature of an outrage.
+Read the summons of the ghost, still 'naked of ornament and simple':
+
+    '"O sweet Marg'ret, O dear Marg'ret!
+      I pray thee speak to me;
+    Gie me my faith and troth, Marg'ret,
+      As I gae it to thee,"'
+
+along with the 'improved' version:
+
+    '"Awake!" she cried, "thy true love calls,
+      Come from her midnight grave;
+    Now let thy pity hear the maid
+      Thy love refused to save."'
+
+Of a long antiquity most of these Mythological Ballads must be, if not
+in their actual phraseology, in the dark superstitions they embody and
+in the pathetic glimpses they afford us of the thoughts and fears and
+hopes of the men and women of the days of long ago--the days before
+feudalism; the days, as some inquisitors of the ballad assure us, when
+religion was a kind of fetichism or ancestor worship, when the laws were
+the laws of the tribe or family, and when the cannibal feast may have
+been among the customs of the race. We cannot find a time when this
+inheritance of legend was not old; when it was not sung, and committed
+to memory, and handed down to later generations in some rude rhyme. The
+leading 'types' were in the wallet of Autolycus; and he describes
+certain of them with a seasoning of his grotesque humour, to his simple
+country audience. There were the well-attested tale of the _Usurer's
+Wife_, a ballad sung, as ballads are wont, 'to a very doleful
+tune'--obviously a form of the Supernatural Birth; and the story, true
+as it is pitiful, of the fish that turned to woman, and then back again
+to fish, in which he that runs may read an example from the Mermaid
+Cycle. They are to be found to-day, often in debased and barely
+recognisable guise, in the hands of the peripatetic ballad-mongers who
+still haunt fairs and sing in the streets, and in the memories of
+multitudes of country folks who know scarce any other literature bearing
+the magic trademark of Old Romance.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE ROMANTIC BALLAD
+
+    'O they rade on, and farther on,
+      By the lee licht o' the moon,
+    Until they cam' to a wan water,
+      And there they lichted them doon.'
+
+        _The Douglas Tragedy._
+
+
+It may look like taking a liberty with the chart of ballad poetry to
+label as 'romantic' a single province of this kingdom of Old Romance. It
+is probably not even the most ancient of the provinces of balladry, but
+it has some claim to be regarded as the central one in fame and in
+wealth--the one that yields the purest and richest ore of poetry. It is
+that wherein the passion and frenzy of love is not merely an element or
+a prominent motive, but is the controlling spirit and the absorbing
+interest.
+
+As has been acknowledged, it is not possible to make any hard and fast
+division of the Scottish ballads by applying to them this or any other
+test; and mention has already been made, on account of the mythological
+or superstitious features they possess, of a number of the choicest of
+these old lays that turn essentially upon the strength or the weakness,
+the constancy or the inconstancy, the rapture or the sorrow of earthly
+love. Love in the ballads is nearly always masterful, imperious,
+exacting; nearly always its reward is death and dule, and not life and
+happiness. But as it spurns all obstacles, it meets its fate
+unflinchingly. No sacrifices are too great, no penance too dire, no
+shame or sin too black to turn aside for an instant the rush of this
+impetuous passion, which runs bare-breasted on the drawn sword.
+
+It is not to the ballads we must go for example--precept of this or of
+any kind there is none--in the _bourgeois_ and respectable virtues; of
+the sober and chastened behaviour that comes of a prudent fear of
+consequences, of a cold temperament and a calculating spirit. The good
+or the ill done by the heroes and heroines of the Romantic Ballad is
+done on the spur of the moment, on the impulse of hot blood. Whether it
+be sin or sacrifice, the prompting is not that of convention, but of
+Nature herself. Love and hate, though they may burn and glow like a
+volcano, are not prodigal of words. It is one of the marks by which we
+may distinguish the characters in the ballads from those in later and
+more cultivated fields of literature that, as a rule, they say less
+rather than more than they mean. They speak daggers; but they are far
+more apt in using them. At a word or look the lovers are ready to die
+for each other; but of the language of endearment they are not prodigal;
+and a phrase of tenderness is sweet in proportion that it is rare.
+
+With the tamer affections it fares no better than with the moral law
+when it comes in the path of the master passion. Mother and sisters are
+defied and forsaken; father and brethren are resisted at the sword's
+point when they cross, as is their wont, the course of true love. It is
+curious to note how little, except as a foil, the ballad makes of
+brotherly or sisterly love. It finds exquisite expression in the tale of
+_Chil Ether_ and his twin sister,
+
+    'Who loved each other tenderly
+      'Boon everything on earth.
+
+    "The ley likesna the simmer shower
+      Nor girse the morning dew,
+    Better, dear Lady Maisrie,
+      Than Chil Ether loves you."'
+
+But for this, among other reasons, the genuine antiquity of the ballad
+is under some suspicion.
+
+In modern fiction or drama the lady hesitates between the opposing
+forces of love and of family pride and duty; the old influences in her
+life do not yield to the new without a struggle. But of struggle or
+indecision the ballad heroine knows, or at least says, nothing. A
+glance, a whispered word, a note of harp or horn, and she flings down
+her 'silken seam,' and whether she be king's daughter or beggar maid she
+obeys the spell, and follows the enchanter to greenwood or to broomy
+hill, to the ends of the earth, and to the gates of death.
+
+For when the gallant knight and his 'fair may' ride away, prying eyes
+are upon them; black care and red vengeance climb up behind them and
+keep them company. _The Douglas Tragedy_ may be selected for its
+terseness and dramatic strength, for the romance and pathos inwoven in
+the very names and scenes with which it is associated, as the type of a
+favourite story which under various titles--_Earl Brand_ and the _Child
+of Elle_ among the rest--has, time beyond knowledge, captivated the
+imagination and drawn the tears of ballad-lovers. In the best-known
+Scots version--that which Sir Walter Scott has recovered for us, and
+which bears some touches of his rescuing hand--it is the lady-mother who
+gives the alarm that the maiden has fled under cloud of night with her
+lover:
+
+    'Rise up, rise up, my seven bauld sons,
+      And put on your armour so bright,
+    And take better care of your youngest sister,
+      For your eldest 's awa' the last night.'
+
+In English variants, it is the sour serving-man or false bower-woman who
+gives the alarm and sets the chase in motion. But there are other
+differences that enter into the very essence of the story, and express
+the diverse feeling of the Scottish and the English ballad. In the
+latter there is a pretty scene of entreaty and reconciliation; the
+lady's tears soften the harsh will of the father, and stay the lifted
+blade of the lover, and all ends merry as a marriage bell. But in the
+Scottish ballads fathers and lovers are not given to the melting mood.
+In sympathy with the scenery and atmosphere, the ballad spirit is with
+us sterner and darker; and just as the materials of that tender little
+idyll of faithful love, _The Three Ravens_, are in Scottish hands
+transformed into the drear, wild dirge of _The Twa Corbies_, the gallant
+adventure of the _Child of Elle_ turns inevitably to tragedy by Douglas
+Water and Yarrow. But how much more true to this soul of romance is the
+choice of the northern minstrel! Lady Margaret, as she holds Lord
+William's bridle-rein while he deals those strokes so 'wondrous sair' at
+her nearest kin, is a figure that will haunt the 'stream of sorrow' as
+long as verse has power to move the hearts of men:
+
+    '"O choose, O choose, Lady Marg'ret," he cried,
+      "O whether will ye gang or bide?"
+    "I 'll gang, I 'll gang, Lord William," she said,
+      "For you 've left me no other guide."
+
+    He lifted her on a milk-white steed,
+      And himself on a dapple grey,
+    With a buglet horn hung down by his side,
+      And slowly they both rade away.
+
+    O they rade on, and farther on,
+      By the lee licht o' the moon,
+    Until they cam' to a wan water,
+      And there they lichted them doon.
+
+    "Hold up, hold up, Lord William," she said,
+      "For I fear that ye are slain."
+    "'Tis naething but the shadow of my scarlet cloak
+      That shines in the water so plain."'
+
+The man who can listen to these lines without a thrill is proof against
+the Ithuriel spear of Romance. He is not made of penetrable stuff, and
+need waste no thought on the Scottish ballads.
+
+To close the tale comes that colophon that as naturally ends the typical
+ballad as 'Once upon a time' begins the typical nursery tale:
+
+    'Lord William was buried in St. Mary's Kirk,
+      Lady Margaret in St. Mary's Quire;
+    And out of her grave there grew a birk,
+      And out of the knight's a brier.
+
+    And they twa met and they twa plait,
+      As fain they wad be near;
+    And a' the world might ken right well
+      They were twa lovers dear.'
+
+Birk and brier; vine and rose; cypress and orange; thorn and olive--the
+plants in which the buried lovers of ballad romance live again and
+intertwine their limbs, vary with the clime and race; and just as the
+'Black Douglas' of the Yarrow ballad--'Wow but he was rough!'--plucks up
+the brier, and 'flings it in St. Mary's Loch,' the King, in the
+Portuguese folk-song, cuts down the cypress and orange that perpetuate
+the loves of Count Nello and the Infanta, and then grinds his teeth to
+see the double stream of blood flow from them and unite, proving that
+'in death they are not divided.'
+
+The scene of the Scottish story is supposed to be Blackhouse, on the
+Douglas Burn, a feeder of the Yarrow, the farm on which Scott's friend,
+William Laidlaw, the author of _Lucy's Flittin'_, was born. Seven stones
+on the heights above, where the 'Ettrick Shepherd,' with his dog Hector,
+herded sheep and watched for the rising of the Queen of Faery through
+the mist, mark the spot where the seven bauld brethren fell.
+
+But Yarrow Vale is strewn with the sites of those tragedies of the
+far-off years, forgotten by history but remembered in song and
+tradition. Its green hills enclose the very sanctuary of romantic
+ballad-lore. Its clear current sings a mournful song of the 'good
+heart's bluid' that once stained its wave; of the drowned youth caught
+in the 'cleaving o' the craig.' The winds that sweep the hillsides and
+bend 'the birks a' bowing' seem to whisper still of the wail of the
+'winsome marrow,' and to have an undernote of sadness on the brightest
+day of summer; while with the fall of the red and yellow leaf the very
+spirit of 'pastoral melancholy' broods and sleeps in this enchanted
+valley. St. Mary's Kirk and Loch; Henderland Tower and the Dow Linn;
+Blackhouse and Douglas Craig; Yarrow Kirk and Deucharswire; Hangingshaw
+and Tinnis; Broadmeadows and Newark; Bowhill and Philiphaugh--what
+memories of love and death, of faith and wrong, of blood and of tears
+they carry! Always by Yarrow the comely youth goes forth, only to fall
+by the sword, fighting against odds in the 'Dowie Dens,' or to be caught
+and drowned in the treacherous pools of this fateful river; always the
+woman is left to weep over her lost and 'lealfu' lord.' In the Dow Glen
+it is the 'Border Widow,' upon whose bower the 'Red Tod of Falkland' has
+broken and slain her knight, whose grave she must dig with her own
+hands:
+
+    'I took his body on my back,
+    And whiles I gaed and whiles I sat;
+    I digged a grave and laid him in,
+    And happed him wi' the sod sae green.
+
+    But think nae ye my heart was sair
+    When I laid the moul's on his yellow hair;
+    O think nae ye my heart was wae
+    When I turned about awa' to gae.
+
+    Nae living man I 'll love again,
+    Since that my lovely knight is slain;
+    Wi' ae lock o' his yellow hair
+    I 'll chain my heart for evermair.'
+
+An echo of this, but blending with poignant grief a masculine note of
+rage and vengeance, is the lament of Adam Fleming for Burd Helen, who
+dropped dead in his arms at their trysting-place in 'fair Kirkconnell
+Lea,' from the shot fired across the Kirtle by the hand of his jealous
+rival:
+
+    'O thinkna ye my heart was sair,
+    When my love drapt doun and spak nae mair!
+    There did she swoon wi' meikle care
+              On fair Kirkconnell Lea.
+
+    O Helen fair, beyond compare!
+    I 'll make a garland o' thy hair
+    Shall bind my heart for evermair
+              Until the day I dee.'
+
+Still older, and not less sad and sweet, is the lilt of _Willie Drowned
+in Yarrow_, the theme amplified, but not improved, in Logan's lyric:
+
+    'O Willie 's fair and Willie 's rare,
+      And Willie wondrous bonnie;
+    And Willie hecht to marry me
+      If e'er he married ony.'
+
+Gamrie, in Buchan, contends with the 'Dowie Howms' as the scene of this
+fragment; but surely its sentiment is pure Yarrow:
+
+    'She sought him east, she sought him west,
+      She sought him braid and narrow;
+    Syne in the cleaving o' a craig
+      She found him drowned in Yarrow.'
+
+But best-remembered of the Yarrow Cycle is _The Dowie Dens_. One cannot
+analyse the subtle aroma of this flower of Yarrow ballads. In it the
+song of the river has been wedded to its story 'like perfect music unto
+noble words.' It is indeed the voice of Yarrow, chiding, imploring,
+lamenting; a voice 'most musical, most melancholy.' A ballad minstrel
+with a master-touch upon the chords of passion and pathos, with a
+feeling for dramatic intensity of effect that Nature herself must have
+taught him, must have left us these wondrous pictures of the quarrel,
+hot and sudden; of the challenge, fiercely given and accepted; of the
+appeal, so charged with wild forebodings of evil:
+
+    '"O stay at hame, my noble lord,
+      O stay at hame, my marrow!
+    My cruel kin will you betray
+      On the dowie howms o' Yarrow"';
+
+of the treacherous ambuscade under Tinnis bank; of the stubborn fight,
+in which a single 'noble brand' holds its own against nine, until the
+cruel brother comes behind that comeliest knight and 'runs his body
+thorough'; of the yearning and waiting of the 'winsome marrow,' while
+fear clutches at her heart:
+
+    '"Yestreen I dreamed a doleful dream,
+      I fear there will be sorrow,
+    I dreamed I pu'ed the birk sae green
+      For my true love on Yarrow.
+
+    O gentle wind that blaweth south
+      Frae where my love repaireth,
+    Blaw me a kiss frae his dear mouth
+      And tell me how he fareth"';
+
+lastly, of the quest 'the bonnie forest thorough,' until on the trampled
+den by Deucharswire, near Whitehope farmhouse, she finds the 'ten slain
+men,' and among them 'the fairest rose was ever cropped on Yarrow':
+
+    'She kissed his cheek, she kaimed his hair,
+      She searched his wounds a' thorough,
+    She kissed them till her lips grew red
+      On the dowie howms o' Yarrow.'
+
+The story is said to be founded on the slaughter of Walter Scott of
+Oakwood, of the house of Thirlstane, by John Scott of Tushielaw, with
+whose sister Grizel the murdered man had, in 1616, contracted an
+irregular marriage, to the offence of her kin. On this showing, it is of
+the later crop of the ballads. But it is well-nigh impossible to think
+of rueful Yarrow flowing through her dens to any other measure than that
+which keeps repeating
+
+              'By strength of sorrow
+    The unconquerable strength of love.'
+
+But, as Wordsworth reminds us, these ever-youthful waters have their
+gladsome notes. On the not unchallengeable ground that it makes mention,
+in one version, of 'St. Mary's' as the fourth Scots Kirk at which halt
+was made after leaving the English Border, _The Gay Goshawk_ has been
+set down among the Yarrow ballads; and Hogg has confirmed the claim by
+using the tale as the foundation of his _Flower of Yarrow_. Even here
+such happiness as the lovers find comes by a perilous way past the very
+gates of the grave. The feigning of death, as the one means of escape
+from kinsfolk's ban to the arms of love, was a device known to Juliet
+and to other heroines of old plays and romances. But few could have
+abode the test suggested by the 'witch woman' or cruel stepmother, whose
+experience had taught her that 'much a lady young will do, her ain true
+love to win':
+
+    '"Tak' ye the burning lead,
+    And drap a drap on her white bosom
+      To try if she be dead."'
+
+And Lord William, at St. Mary's Kirk, was more fortunate than Romeo in
+the vault of the Capulets; for when he rent the shroud from the face the
+blood rushed back to the cheeks and lips, 'like blood-draps in the
+snaw,' and the 'leeming e'en' laughed back into his own:
+
+    '"Gie me a chive o' your bread, my love,
+      And ae glass o' your wine,
+    For I hae fasted for your love
+      These weary lang days nine."'
+
+_The Nut-brown Bride_ and _Fair Janet_ might also be identified as among
+the Yarrow lays, if only it were granted that there is but one 'St.
+Mary's Kirk.' In the former, the balladist treats, with dramatic fire
+and fine insight into the springs of action, the theme that
+
+    'To be wroth with those we love
+    Doth work like madness in the brain.'
+
+As in Barbara Allan, a word spoken amiss sets division between two
+hearts that had beat as one:
+
+    'Lord Thomas spoke a word in jest,
+      Fair Annet took it ill.'
+
+In haste he consults mother and brother whether he should marry the
+'Nut-brown Maid, and let Fair Annet be,' and so long as they praise the
+tochered lass he scorns their counsel; he will not have 'a fat fadge by
+the fire.' But when his sister puts in a word for Annet his resentment
+blazes up anew; he will marry her dusky rival in despite. With a heart
+not less hot, we may be sure, his forsaken love dons her gayest robes,
+and at St. Mary's Kirk she casts the poor brown bride into the shade in
+dress as well as in looks. Small wonder if the bride speaks out with
+spite when her bridegroom reaches across her to lay a red rose on
+Annet's knee. The words between the two angry women are like
+rapier-thrusts, keen and aimed at the heart. 'Where did ye get the
+rose-water that maks your skin so white?' asks the bride; and when
+Annet's swift retort goes home, she can only respond with the long
+bodkin drawn from her hair. The word in jest costs the lives of three.
+Fair Janet's is another tragic wedding; love, and jealousy, and guilt
+again hold tryst in the little kirk whose grey walls are scarce to be
+traced on the green platform above the loch. 'I 've seen other days,'
+says the pale bride to her lost lover as he dances with her
+bridesmaiden:
+
+    '"I 've seen other days wi' you, Willie,
+      And so hae mony mae;
+    Ye would hae danced wi' me yoursel'
+      And let a' ithers gae"';
+
+and, dancing, she drops dead.
+
+Fasting, and fire, and sickness unto death were, however, tame ordeals
+compared with those which 'Burd Helen' came through, as they are
+described in the ballad Professor Child holds, not without reason, to
+have 'perhaps no superior' in our own or any other tongue. Patient
+Grizel, herself the incarnation in literary form of a type of woman's
+faithfulness and meek endurance of wrong that had floated long in
+mediaeval tradition, might have shrunk from some of the cruel tasks which
+Lord Thomas--the 'Child Waters' of the favourite English variant--lays
+upon the mother of his unborn child--the woman whose self-surrender had
+been so complete that she has not the blessing of Holy Church and the
+support of wifely vows to comfort her in her hour of trial. All the
+summer day she runs by his bridle-rein until they come to the Water of
+Clyde, which 'Sweet Willie and May Margaret' also sought to ford on a
+similar errand:
+
+    'And he was never so courteous a knight,
+      As stand and bid her ride;
+    And she was never so poor a may,
+      As ask him for to bide.'
+
+She stables his steed; she waits humbly at table as the little page-boy;
+she listens, her colour coming and going, to the mother's scorns and the
+young sister's naive questions. But never, until the supreme moment of
+her distress, does she draw one sign of pity or relenting from her harsh
+lord. Then, indeed, love and remorse, as if they had been dammed back,
+break forth like a flood, that bursts the very door, and makes it 'in
+flinders flee.' And because
+
+    'The marriage and the kirkin'
+      Were baith held on ae day,'
+
+our simple balladist bids us believe that the twain lived happily ever
+after.
+
+The variations of this ancient tale, localised in nearly every European
+country, are innumerable; and Professor Veitch was disposed to trace
+them to the thirteenth century _Tale of the Ash_, by Marie of France.
+The 'Fair Annie' of another ballad on the theme seems to have borrowed
+both name and history directly from the 'Skiaen Annie' of Danish
+folk-poetry. Here the old love suffers the like indignity that was
+thrown upon the too-too submissive Griselda; she has to make ready the
+bridal bed for her supplanter and do other menial offices, until a happy
+chance reveals the fact that the newcomer is her sister. Yet neither
+from Fair Annie nor from Burd Helen comes word of reproach or complaint.
+The exceeding bitter thought is whispered only to the heart:
+
+    '"Lie still, my babe, lie still, my babe,
+      Lie still as lang 's ye may;
+    For your father rides on high horseback,
+      And cares na for us twae."'
+
+And again,
+
+    '"Gin my seven sons were seven young rats,
+      Runnin' upon the castle wa';
+    And I were a grey cat mysel',
+      Soon should I worry ane and a'."'
+
+Wide, surely, is the gulf between the Original Woman of old romance and
+the New Woman of recent fiction. The change, no doubt, is for the
+better; and yet is it altogether for the better?
+
+According to all modern canons, the conduct of these too-tardy
+bridegrooms was brutal beyond words; and as for the heroines of the
+Romantic Ballad, Mother Grundy, had she the handling of them, would use
+them worse than ever did moody brother or crafty stepmother. But the
+balladists and ballad characters had their own gauges of conduct. Their
+morals were not other or better than the morals of their age. They
+strained out the gnats and swallowed the camels of the law as given to
+Moses; perhaps if they could look into modern society and the modern
+novel they would charge the same against our own times and literature.
+If they broke, as they were too ready to do, the Sixth Commandment, or
+the Seventh, they made no attempt to glose the sin; they dealt not in
+innuendo or _double entendre_. Beside the page of modern realism, the
+ballad page is clean and wholesome. Human passion unrestrained there may
+be; but no sickly or vicious sentiment. There is a punctilious sense of
+honour; and if it is sometimes the letter rather than the spirit of vow
+or promise that is kept, the knights and ladies in the ballads are no
+worse than are the Pharisees of our day; and they are always ready to
+pay, and generally do pay, the utmost penalty.
+
+Thus, in that most powerful and tragic ballad, _Clerk Saunders_, May
+Margaret ties a napkin about her eyes that she 'may swear, and keep her
+aith,' to her 'seven bauld brothers,' that she had not seen her lover
+'since late yestreen'; she carries him across the threshold of her
+bower, that she may be able to say that his foot had never been there.
+The story of the sleeping twain--the excuses for their sin; the reason
+why ruth should turn aside vengeance--is told, in staccato sentences, by
+the brothers as they stand by the bedside of their 'ae sister,' with
+'torches burning bright':
+
+    'Out and spake the first o' them,
+      "I wot that they are lovers dear";
+    And out and spake the second o' them,
+      "They 've been in love this mony a year";
+
+    And out and spake the third o' them,
+      "His father had nae mair than he."'
+
+And so until the seventh--the Rashleigh of the band--who spake no word,
+but let his 'bright brown brand' speak for him. What follows rises to
+the extreme height of the balladist's art; literature might be
+challenged for anything surpassing it in simplicity and power, in the
+mingling of horror and pathos:
+
+    'Clerk Saunders he started and Margaret she turned,
+      Into his arms as asleep she lay;
+    And sad and silent was the night
+      That was atween the twae.
+
+    And they lay still and sleeped sound,
+      Until the day began to daw,
+    And softly unto him she said,
+      "It 's time, true love, you were awa'."
+
+    But he lay still and sleeped sound,
+      Albeit the sun began to sheen;
+    She looked atween her and the wa',
+      And dull and drumlie were his een.'
+
+In the majority of ballads of the _Clerk Saunders_ class there is some
+base agent who betrays trust and brings death upon the lovers. 'Fause
+Foodrage' takes many forms in these ancient tales without changing type.
+He is the slayer of 'Lily Flower' in _Jellon Graeme_; and the boy whom
+he has preserved and brought up sends the arrow singing to his guilty
+heart. Lammiken, the 'bloodthirsty mason,' who must have a life for his
+wage, is another enemy within the house who finds his way through
+'steekit yetts'; and he is assisted by the 'fause nourice.' In other
+ballads it is the 'kitchen-boy,' the 'little foot-page,' the 'churlish
+carle,' or the bower-woman who plays the spy and tale-bearer. In
+_Glenkindie_, 'Gib, his man,' is the vile betrayer of the noble harper
+and his lady. Sometimes, as in _Gude Wallace_, _Earl Richard_, and _Sir
+James the Rose_, it is the 'light leman' who plays traitor. But she
+quickly repents, and meets her fate in the fire or at the sword's point,
+in 'Clyde Water' or in 'the dowie den in the Lawlands o' Balleichan.' In
+_Gil Morice_, that ballad which Gray thought 'divine,' it is 'Willie,
+the bonnie boy,' whom the hero trusted with his message, that in malice
+and wilfulness brings about the tremendous catastrophe of the tale. He
+calls aloud in hall the words he was bid whisper in the ear of Lord
+Barnard's lady--to meet Gil Morice in the forest, and 'speir nae bauld
+baron's leave.'
+
+    'The lady stamped wi' her foot
+      And winked wi' her e'e;
+    But for a' that she could say or do
+      Forbidden he wadna be.'
+
+It is the angry and jealous baron who, in woman guise, meets and slays
+the youth who is waiting in gude greenwood, and brings back the bloody
+head to the mother.
+
+Other fine ballads in which mother and son carry on tragic colloquy are
+_Lord Randal_ and _Edward_. These versions of a story of treachery and
+blood, conveyed in the dark hints of a strange dialogue, have received
+many touches from later hands; but the germ comes down from the age of
+tradition. It has even been noted that, with the curious tenacity with
+which the ballad memory often clings to a detail while forgetting or
+mislaying essential fact, the food with which, in the version Burns
+recovered for Johnson's _Museum_, Lord Randal is poisoned--'eels boiled
+in broo'--is identical with that given to his prototype in the
+folk-ballads of Italy and other countries. The structure of this
+ballad, like the beautiful old air to which it is sung, bears marks of
+antiquity, and its wide diffusion militates against Scott's not very
+convincing suggestion that it refers to the alleged poisoning of the
+Regent Randolph. But it lacks the terrible and dramatic intensity of
+_Son Davie_, better known in the version transmitted, under the name of
+_Edward_, by Lord Hailes to Bishop Percy's _Reliques_. Here it is the
+murderer, and not the victim, who answers; and it is the questioning
+mother, and not the absent false love, with whom the curse is left as a
+legacy. Despair had never a more piercing utterance than this:
+
+    '"And what will ye leave to your bairns and your wife?
+                        Edward, Edward!
+    And what will ye leave to your bairns and your wife
+    When ye gang over the sea, O?"
+
+    "The warld 's room, let them beg through life,
+                        Mither, Mither!
+    The warld 's room, let them beg through life,
+    For them never mair will I see, O!"
+
+    "And what will ye leave to your ain mither dear?
+                        Edward, Edward!
+    And what will ye leave to your ain mother dear,
+    My dear son, now tell me, O?"
+
+    "The curse o' hell from me shall ye bear,
+                        Mither, Mither!
+    The curse o' hell from me shall ye bear,
+    Sic counsels ye gae me, O!"'
+
+Although Yarrow be the favoured haunt on Scottish soil--may we not also
+say on the whole round of earth?--of the Romantic Ballad, and has
+coloured them, and taken colour from them, for all time, yet there are
+other streams and vales that only come short of being its rivals.
+'Leader Haughs,' for instance, which the harp of Nicol Burne, the 'Last
+Minstrel' who wandered and sang in the Borderland, has linked
+indissolubly with Yarrow braes, know of ballad strains well-nigh as
+sweet as those of the neighbour water. But cheerfulness rather than
+sadness is their prevailing note. _Auld Maitland_, the lay which James
+Hogg's mother repeated to Scott, has its scene on Leader side, and at
+the 'darksome town'--a misnomer in these days--of Lauder. Long before
+the time of that tough champion, St. Cuthbert and True Thomas had
+wandered and dreamed and sang by Leader. It was a Lord Lauderdale who
+rode to Traquair to court, after the older fashion, Katherine Janferie:
+
+    'He toldna her father, he toldna her mither,
+      He toldna ane o' her kin;
+    But he whispered the bonnie may hersel',
+      And has her favour won.'
+
+He it was, according to the old ballad, who rode to the bridal at the
+eleventh hour, with four and twenty Leader lads behind him:
+
+    '"I comena here to fight," he said,
+      "I comena here to play;
+    But to lead a dance wi' the bonnie bride,
+      And mount and go my way"';
+
+and it was Lord Lochinvar (although 'he who told the story later' has
+taught us so differently) who played the inglorious part of the deserted
+bridegroom. Scott himself drank in the passion for Border romance and
+chivalry on the braes of Sandyknowe, between Leader and Eden waters, not
+far from Smailholm and Dryburgh, and Huntly Bank and Mellerstain, and
+Rhymer's Tower and the Broom o' the Cowdenknowes. According to Mr. Ford,
+the ballad which takes its name from this last-mentioned spot is
+traditionally assigned to a Mellerstain maid named Crosbie, whose words
+were set to music by no less famous a hand than that of David Rizzio. So
+that here at least we have a vague echo of the name of a balladist and
+of a ballad-air composer. Between them, the maid of Mellerstain and
+'Davy' have harmonised most musically, albeit with some touch of moral
+laxity, the spirit of pastoral and of ballad romance:
+
+    'The hills were high on ilka side,
+      And the bucht i' the lirk o' the hill,
+    And aye as she sang her voice it rang
+      Out ower the head o' yon hill.
+
+    There cam' a troop o' gentlemen,
+      Merrily riding by,
+    And ane o' them rade out o' the way
+      To the bucht to the bonnie may.'
+
+Nowhere has the ballad inspiration and the ballad touch lingered longer
+than by Eden and Leader and Whitadder. Lady Grizel Baillie (who also
+wonned in Mellerstain) had them--
+
+    'There once was a may and she lo'ed nae men,
+    And she biggit her bonnie bower doun in yon glen'--
+
+and it still lives in Lady John Scott, who has sung of _The Bonnie
+Bounds of Cheviot_ as if the mantle of the Border minstrels had fallen
+upon her.
+
+After all, the ballads of Yarrow and Ettrick, of the Merse and
+Teviotdale, owe their superior fame as much as anything to the happy
+chance that the Wizard of Abbotsford dwelt in the midst of them, and
+seizing upon them before they were forgotten, made them and the
+localities classical. Other districts have in this way been despoiled to
+some extent of their proper meed of honour. Fortune as well as merit has
+favoured the Border Minstrelsy in the race for survival and for
+precedence in the popular memory. But Galloway, a land pervaded with
+romance, claims at least one ballad that can rank with the best. _Lord
+Gregory_ has aliases and duplicates without number. But the scene is
+always Loch Ryan and some castled island within sight of that arm of the
+sea, whither the love-lorn Annie fares in her boat 'wi' sails o' the
+light green silk and tows o' taffetie,' in quest of her missing lord:
+
+    '"O row the boat, my mariners,
+      And bring me to the land!
+    For yonder I see my love's castle
+      Close by the salt sea strand."'
+
+Alas! cold is her welcome as she stands with her young son in her arms,
+and knocks and calls on her love, while 'the wind blaws through her
+yellow hair, and the rain draps o'er her chin.' A voice, that seems that
+of Lord Gregory, bids her go hence as 'a witch or a wil' warlock, or a
+mermaid o' the flood'; and with a woful heart she turns back to the sea
+and the storm. And when he wakes up from boding dreams to find his true
+love and his child have been turned from his door, it is too late. His
+cry to the waves is as vain as Annie's cry to that 'ill woman,' his
+mother, who has betrayed them:
+
+    '"And hey, Annie, and how, Annie!
+      O Annie, winna ye bide?"
+    But aye the mair that he cried Annie,
+      The braider grew the tide.
+
+    "And hey, Annie, and how, Annie!
+      Dear Annie, speak to me!"
+    But aye the louder he cried Annie,
+      The louder roared the sea.'
+
+The shores and basin of the Forth have also their rowth of ballads; and
+some of them have, like _The Lass of Lochryan_, the sound of the waves
+and the salt smell of the sea mingled with their plaintive music. _Gil
+Morice_ has been 'placed' by Carronside--Ossian's 'roaring Carra'--a
+meet setting for the story. _Sir Patrick Spens_ cleaves to the shores of
+Fife; though some, eager for the honour of the North, have claimed that
+it is Aberdour in Buchan that is spoken of in the ballad. By the
+powerful spell of this old rhyme, the king still sits and drinks the
+blood-red wine in roofless Dunfermline tower; the ladies still haunt the
+windy headland--Kinghorn or Elie Ness--with 'their kaims intil their
+hands' waiting in vain the return of their 'good Scots lords'; the
+wraith of Sir Patrick himself in misty days strides the silver strand
+under the Hawes Wood, reading the braid letter. Near by is Donibristle;
+and it keeps the memory of the 'Bonnie Earl of Moray,' slain here, hints
+the balladist--though history is silent on the point--for pleasing too
+well the Queen's eye at Holyrood.
+
+Edinburgh, too, draws a good part of its romance from the ballad bard.
+Mary Hamilton, of the Queen's Maries, rode through the Netherbow Port to
+the gallows-foot:
+
+    '"Yestreen the Queen had four Maries,
+      The night she 'll hae but three;
+    There was Marie Seton, and Marie Beaton,
+      And Marie Carmichael, and me."'
+
+The Marchioness of Douglas wandered disconsolate on Arthur's Seat and
+drank of St. Anton's well:
+
+    '"O waly, waly, love be bonnie
+      A little time while it is new,
+    But when it 's auld it waxes cauld
+      And fades awa' like morning dew.
+
+    But had I wist before I kissed
+      That love had been so ill to win,
+    I 'd locked my heart within a kist
+      And fastened it wi' a siller pin"';
+
+and across the hill lies the 'Wells o' Wearie.' Nowhere else has the
+wail of forsaken love found such wistful expression--except in _The
+Fause Lover_:
+
+    '"But again, dear love, and again, dear love,
+      Will you never love me again?
+    Alas! for loving you so well,
+      And you not me again."'
+
+From Edinburgh wandered Leezie Lindsay, kilting her coats of green satin
+to follow her Lord Ronald Macdonald the weary way to the Highland
+Border; and to its plainstanes came the faithful Lady of Gicht to ransom
+her Geordie:
+
+    'My Geordie, O my Geordie,
+      The love I bear my Geordie!
+    For the very ground I walk upon
+      Bears witness I lo'e Geordie.'
+
+And these regions of the North have as much of the 'blood-red wine' of
+ballad romance coursing through them as Tweedside or Lothian, although
+it may be of harsher and coarser flavour. Space does not allow of doing
+justice to the Northern Ballads, some of them simple strains, made
+familiar by sweet airs, like _Hunting Tower_, or _Bessie Bell and Mary
+Gray_, or the _Banks of the Lomond_; others, and these chiefly from the
+wintry side of Cairn o' Mount, 'bleak and bare' as that wilderness of
+heather; still others, and from the same quarter, gallant, warm-hearted,
+light-stepping tunes as ever were sung--_Glenlogie_, for instance:
+
+    'There were four-and-twenty nobles
+      Rode through Banchory fair;
+    And bonnie Glenlogie
+      Was flower o' them there.'
+
+For the most part they are variants, many of them badly mutilated in the
+rhymes, that are familiar, under other names, farther south. They gather
+about the family history and the family trees of the great houses--the
+Gordons for choice--planted by Dee and Don and Ythan, where Gadie runs
+at the 'back o' Benachie,' and in the Bog o' Gicht; and they tell of
+love adventures and mischances that have befallen the Lords of Huntly or
+Aboyne, the Lairds of Drum or Meldrum, and even the humble Trumpeter of
+Fyvie.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE HISTORICAL BALLAD
+
+    'It fell about the Lammas tide,
+      When the muirmen win their hay,
+    The doughty Douglas bound him to ride
+      Into England, to drive a prey.'
+
+        _The Battle of Otterburn._
+
+
+The kindly Scot will not quarrel with the comparative mythologist who
+tells him that the superstitions embalmed in his ballad minstrelsy are
+wanderers out of misty times and far countries--primitive ideas and
+beliefs that may have started with his remote ancestors from the heart
+of the East, to find harbour in the valleys of the Cheviots and the
+islands of the West, or that have drifted thither with the tide of later
+inroads. Nor will he greatly protest when the literary historian assures
+him that the plots and incidents in the popular old rhymes of the
+frenzies and parlous adventures of love have been borrowed or adapted
+from the metrical and prose romances of the Middle Ages. He can
+appreciate in his poetry, as in his pedigree, high and long descent; all
+the more since, as he flatters himself, whencesoever the seed may have
+come, it has found kindly soil, and drawn from thence a strength and
+colour such as few other lands and ballad literatures can match.
+
+But to suggest that not even our Historical Songs of fight and of foray
+against our 'auld enemies' of England are genuine, unalloyed products of
+the national spirit; to hint that _Kinmont Willie_, _The Outlaw Murray_,
+or _The Battle of Otterburn_ itself is an exotic--that were a somewhat
+dangerous exercise of the art of analytic criticism, in the presence of
+a Scottish audience. In truth, no poetry of any tongue or land is more
+powerfully dominated by the sense of locality--is more expressive of the
+manners of the time and mood of the race--than those rough Border lays
+of moonlight rides, on reiving or on rescue bound, and of death fronted
+boldly in the press of spears or 'behind the bracken bush.' These are
+not tales of the infancy of a people. Scotland had already attained to
+something of national unity of blood and of sentiment before they came
+to birth. For generations and centuries she had to keep her head and her
+bounds against an enemy as watchful and warlike as herself, and many
+times as strong. Blows were struck and returned, keen and sudden as
+lightning. The 'hammer of the Scots,' wielded by the English kings, had
+smitten, and under its blows the race had been welded together and
+wrought to a temper like steel, supple upon occasion to bend, but
+elastic and unbreakable, and with a sharp cutting edge.
+
+Heroes conquered or fell; and sometimes a minstrel was by to sing the
+exploit. Patriotism and the joy of combat are leading notes in these
+Historic Ballads. The annals of Scotland are full of family and clan
+feuds--the quarrels of kites and crows. But, with a fine and true
+instinct, the best of these ballads avoid taking account of the
+bickerings in the household. It is when they sing of 'patriot battles
+won of old,' where Scot and Southron met, 'red-wat shod,' that the
+strain rises to its clearest, and 'stirs the heart like the sound of a
+trumpet.' Nor is it always the events that are most noised in the
+history-book that are best remembered in the ballads. The old singers
+and their audiences delighted more in personal episode than in filling a
+big canvas; their genius was dramatic rather than epic. _Hardyknut_,
+with its commemoration of the battle of Largs and the Northmen, although
+accepted by the _literati_ of the early Georgian era as a genuine
+'antique,' has long been proved to be an imitative production of Lady
+Wardlaw's. The rhyme which the Scottish maidens sang about Bannockburn
+is lost. The Wallace group of ballads bears plain marks of spurious
+intermixture, or later composition. There are no traditional verses
+preserved in popular memory regarding the disasters of Neville's Cross
+or of Homildon Hill, where so much good Scots blood soaked an alien sod;
+or of that shameful day of Solway Moss, about which James the Fifth
+muttered strange words on his dying-bed. Even the pathetic strain, more
+lyrical, however, than narrative, in which lament is made for _The
+Flowers o' the Forest_, that were 'wede awa'' at Flodden, came two
+centuries later than the woful battle.
+
+Perhaps it is natural that a warlike people should sing of their
+triumphs rather than of their defeats and humiliations. But if the old
+ballads have lost sight of some great landmarks in the country's
+chronicle, they have preserved names and incidents which the duller pen
+of history has forgotten or overlooked. The breath of poetry passes over
+the Valley of Bones of the national annals, and each knight stands up in
+his place, a breathing man and a living soul. They are none the less
+real and living for us because Dry-as-dust has mislaid the vouchers for
+their birth and their deeds, and cannot fit them into their place in his
+family trees and chronological tables.
+
+It follows, from the strongly patriotic cast of the ballads of war and
+fray, that they should have sprung up most rankly on the battle-fields
+and around the peel-towers of the Borderland. It was on the line of the
+Tweed and of the Cheviots that the long quarrel was fought out; and thus
+the Merse, Ettrick Forest, and Teviotdale; the Debateable Land,
+Liddesdale, and Annan Water became the native countries of the songs of
+raid and battle. The 'Red Harlaw'--which has had its own homespun bard,
+although of a different note and fibre from the minstrels of the
+Border--may be said to have ended the struggle for the mastery between
+Highlands and Lowlands. From thence onward through the age of
+ballad-making, there were _spreaghs_ and feuds enow upon and within the
+Highland Line. But, until the time when Jacobitism came to give change
+of theme and bent, along with change of scene, to the spirit of Scottish
+romance, none of these local bloodlettings sufficed to inspire a ballad
+of more than local fame; unless indeed the story drew part of its power
+to live and to please from other sources besides the mere zest for
+fighting. In distinction, as we shall see from the typical Border War
+Lay, in which woman, if her presence is felt at all, is kept in the
+background, as looker-on or rewarder of the fight, in such Northern
+tales of raid and spulzie as _The Baron of Bracklay_, _Edom o' Gordon_,
+_The Bonnie House o' Airlie_, or even _The Burning o' Frendraught_, she
+is brought into the heart of the scene and forms an abiding and
+controlling influence.
+
+In a word, these are at least as much Romantic as Historical Ballads. We
+suspect that woman's guile and treachery are at work, as soon as we hear
+the taunting words of Bracklay's lady:
+
+    'O rise, my bauld Baron,
+      And turn back your kye,
+    For the lads o' Drumwharron
+      Are driving them bye.'
+
+We are made sure of it, when the minstrel tells us:
+
+    'There was grief in the kitchen
+      But mirth in the ha';
+    But the Baron o' Bracklay
+      Is dead and awa'.'
+
+And in the assault on the 'House o' the Rhodes,' it is not the wild work
+of the Gordons on which our thoughts are fixed; it is not even on the
+Forbeses, riding hard and fast to be in time for rescue:
+
+    'Put on, put on, my michty men,
+      As fast as ye can drie;
+    For he that 's hindmost o' my men
+      Will ne'er get good o' me.'
+
+It is 'the bonnie face that lies on the grass,' and Lady Ogilvie, and
+not her lord or the 'gleyed Argyll,' is central figure of the tale of
+the raid of the Campbells against their hereditary foes in Angus.
+
+As a rule, in those ballads of the Borders whose business is with foray
+and reprisal, we have none of this disturbing element. The sheer love of
+adventure, the chance of exchanging 'hard dunts' with the Englishmen, is
+inducement enough for us to follow the lead of the Douglas or Buccleuch
+across the Waste of Bewcastle or through the wilds of Kidland. The women
+folks are safe and well defended in the peel-towers, from whence, when
+the word has gone out to 'warn the water speedilie,' the bale-fires
+flash up the dales from water-foot to well-e'e, and set the hill-crests
+aflame with the news of the enemy's coming. They may have given the hint
+of a toom larder by serving a dish of spurs on the board. They will be
+the first to welcome home the warden's men or the moss-troopers if they
+return with full hands, or to rally them if they have brought nothing
+back but broken heads. But keeping or breaking the peace on the Borders
+is a man's part; and only men mingle in it. Both sides are too
+accustomed to surprises, and have too many strong fortalices and friends
+at hand, to give the foe the chance of 'lifting' whole families as well
+as their gear and cattle. The last thing one looks for, then, in the
+moss-trooping ballads is a strain of tender and pathetic sentiment. The
+tone is hearty and virile even to boisterousness. The minstrel, like the
+fighters, revels in hard knocks and rough jests. He has ridden with them
+probably, and has had the piper's share of the plunder and whatever else
+was going. He has heard 'the bows that bauldly ring and the arrows
+whiddering near him by,' as he passes through the 'derke Foreste.' He
+took the fell with the other folk in the following of the Scottish
+warden, and looking down the slope towards Reed Water, witnessed the
+beginning and end of the skirmish known as _The Raid of the Reidswire_.
+
+    'Be this our folk had taen the fell
+      And planted pallions there to bide;
+    We looked down the other side,
+      And saw them breasting ower the brae
+    Wi' Sir John Forster as their guide,
+      Full fifteen hundred men and mae.'
+
+With strokes, graphic and humorous, he describes how the meeting of the
+two wardens, 'begun with merriment and mowes,' turned to the exchange of
+such 'reasons rude' between Tyndale and Jed Forest, as flights of arrows
+and 'dunts full dour.' Pride was at the bottom of the mischief; pride
+and the memory of old scores.
+
+    'To deal with proud men is but pain;
+      For either must ye fight or flee,
+    Or else no answer make again,
+      But play the beast and let them be.'
+
+And so, when the English raised the question of surrendering a fugitive,
+
+    'Carmichael bade them speak out plainlie,
+      And cloak no cause for ill or good;
+    The other answering him as vainly,
+      Began to reckon kin and blood;
+    He raise, and raxed him where he stood,
+      And bade him match him wi' his marrows;
+    Then Tyndale heard these reason rude,
+      And they let off a flight of arrows.'
+
+Again, in _Kinmont Willie_, the flower, with one exception to be named,
+of the ballads that celebrate the exploits of the 'ruggers and rivers,'
+the singer lets slip, as it were by accident, that he was of the bold
+and lawless company that broke Carlisle Castell in time of peace. The
+old lay tingles and glows with the restless untameable courage, the
+dramatic fire, the grim humour, and the spirit of good fellowship that
+were characteristic, along with some less admirable qualities, of the
+old Borderers. The rage, tempered with a dash of Scots caution, of the
+Bauld Buccleuch when he heard that his unruly countryman had been taken
+'against the truce of border tide' by the 'fause Sakelde and the keen
+Lord Scroope'; his device for a rescue that while it would set the
+Kinmont free, would 'neither harm English lad nor lass,' or break the
+peace between the countries; the keen questionings and adroit replies
+that passed, like thrust and parry, between the divided bands of the
+warden's men and Sakelde himself, who met them successively as they
+crossed the Debateable Land, until it came to the turn of tongue-tied
+Dickie o' Dryhope, who, having never a word ready, 'thrust the lance
+through his fause bodie,'--all these are told in the most vigorous and
+graphic style of rough first-hand narrative. And then the story-teller
+takes up the parable in his own person, and describes how he and his
+comrades plunged through the flooded Eden, climbed the bank, and through
+'wind and weet and fire and sleet' came beneath the castle wall:--
+
+    'We crept on knees and held our breath,
+      Till we placed the ladders against the wa';
+    And sae ready was Buccleuch himsel'
+      To mount the first before us a'.
+
+    He 's ta'en the watchman by the throat,
+      And flung him down upon the lead--
+    "Had there not been peace between our lands,
+      Upon the other side thou 'dst gaed!"'
+
+In the 'inner prison' lay Willie o' Kinmont, like a wolf in a trap,
+sleeping soft and waking oft, with thoughts of the gallows, on which he
+was to swing in the morning, and of his wife and bairns and the 'gude
+fellows' in the Debateable Land he was never to see again. But in an
+instant, at the hail and sight of his friends, the fearless humour of
+the Border rider comes back to him; mounted, irons and all, on the
+shoulders of Red Rowan, 'the starkest man in Teviotdale,' he must first
+take farewell of his host, Lord Scroope, with a significant promise
+that he would 'pay him lodging maill when first they met on the border
+side.'
+
+    'Then shoulder high, with shout and cry,
+      We bore him down the ladder lang;
+    At every stride Red Rowan made
+      I wot the Kinmont's airns played clang.
+
+    "O mony a time," quo' Kinmont Willie,
+      "I 've ridden a horse baith wild and wud;
+    But a rougher beast than Red Rowan
+      I ween my legs have ne'er bestrode."'
+
+Then comes the wild rush for the Eden, where it flowed from bank to
+brim, with all Carlisle streaming behind in chase, and the bold plunge
+of the fugitives into the spate, leaving Lord Scroope staring after
+them, sore astonished, from the water's edge:
+
+    '"He 's either himsel' a devil frae hell,
+      Or else his mither a witch maun be;
+    I wadna' have ridden that wan water
+      For a' the gowd in Christentie."'
+
+History attests the main incidents and characters of _Kinmont Willie_ as
+true to the facts; and tradition has broidered the story with incidents
+which the ballad itself does not record. The daughter of the smith, on
+the road between Longtown and Langholm, used to relate, half a century
+afterwards, how Buccleuch impatiently thrust his spear through the
+window to arouse her father and rid Armstrong's legs from their
+'cumbrous spurs,' and remembered seeing the rough riders grouped in the
+outer darkness and streaming with wet. The rescue was one of the latest
+of the episodes of Border warfare before the Union of the Crowns; and
+Armstrong of Kinmont himself, besides being a typical specimen of his
+clan,
+
+                      'Able men,
+    Somewhat unruly, and very ill to tame,'
+
+was one of the last of what we may describe as the legitimate line of
+Border freebooters, before the freebooter became merged in the vulgar
+thief, as explained quaintly and sympathetically in Scott of Satchells'
+rhyme:
+
+    'It 's most clear a freebooter doth live in hazard's train;
+    A freebooter 's a cavalier who ventures life for gain;
+    But since King James the Sixth to England went,
+    There has been no cause for grief;
+    And he that hath transgressed since then,
+    Is no cavalier, but a thief.'
+
+No doubt many other like exploits of capture and rescue were enacted and
+recounted on the Borders in the troublous times. _Jock o' the Side_ and
+_Archie o' Ca'field_ read almost like variants of _Kinmont Willie_.
+Their heroes, too, are 'notour lymours and thieves,' living on or near
+the margin of the Debateable Land; and he of the Side, in particular,
+lives in Sir Richard Maitland's bede-roll of the Liddesdale thieves, as
+only 'too well kend' by his peaceable neighbours,
+
+    'A greater thief did never hyde;
+    He never tyris
+    For to brek byris,
+    Owre muir and myris,
+    Owre gude and guide.'
+
+Both are clapped into 'prison strang,' and liberated by a night raid and
+surprise. But the scene of rescue is shifted from Carlisle to Newcastle
+in the one case, and to Dumfries Tolbooth in the other. Hobbie Noble,
+the English outlaw, performs for the redoubtable Jock o' the Side the
+service rendered by Red Rowan; and 'mettled John Hall o' laigh
+Teviotdale' clatters down the Tolbooth stairs with Archie Armstrong of
+the Calfhill on his back, to mount him on his fleet black mare. And from
+the safe side of Tyne and of Nith, instead of Eden, they send their
+jeers and challenges back at the discomfited English pursuers. The old
+balladists may have mixed up places, names, and incidents in their
+memories, as they were rather wont to do, and laid skaith or credit at
+the wrong doors. But while their poetic and dramatic merit may vary, the
+spirit of the very baldest of these ancient songs is irresistible. The
+Border reiver may play a foul trick in the game; the Armstrongs, for
+instance, requited scurvily the services of Hobbie Noble, 'the man that
+lowsed Jock o' the Side;' but the roughest of these tykes, whether they
+rode behind the Captain of Bewcastle or the Laird of Buccleuch or
+Ferniehirst, or fought for their own hand, had their own code of honour,
+and the balladist zealously and jealously measures by it their acts and
+words. The worst of them had courage; they snap their fingers and laugh
+in the very teeth of death. Hobbie Noble, with the can of beer at his
+lips and the rope about his neck, could sing with an approving
+conscience--
+
+    '"Now, fare thee well, sweet Mangerton,
+      For ne'er again I will thee see;
+    I wad hae betrayed nae man alive
+      For a' the gowd in Christentie"'--
+
+a farewell that reminds us of that of the Highland cateran, Macpherson,
+who 'so rantingly, so dantonly,' played a spring and danced to it
+beneath the gallows-tree at Banff, crying out the while against
+'treacherie,' and broke his fiddle across his knee when none among the
+crowd would take it from his hand.
+
+Like Sir Lancelot, in the famous eulogy of Sir Ector, these Borderers of
+old were not only strong men of their hands, but strong also of heart,
+and 'true friends to their friends,' who, since they held the first line
+of defence of the Kingdom, might be said to embrace, after their own
+family and clan, their countrymen at large. They might, on occasion,
+'seek their broth in England and in Scotland both.' But they robbed and
+slew, when it was possible, with patriotic discrimination. In _Johnie
+Armstrong_ and _The Sang o' the Outlaw Murray_ the heroes take credit
+for their 'honesty' and for their services to their country. The former
+boasts that 'never a Scots wife could have said that e'er I skaithed her
+ae puir flee'; and the other that he had won Ettrick Forest from the
+Southron without help from king or noble. Yet the quarrel of both is
+with the Scottish sovereign, who has come South intent on the exemplary
+and kingly work of 'making the rash bush keep the cow'; and, stranger
+still, it is for the bold-spoken outlaws, and not for the legitimate
+guardian of Border peace, that the minstrel engages our sympathies.
+
+If we may credit the surmises of Mr. P. Macgregor Chalmers, the Outlaw
+Murray is none other than the 'John Morvo,' the builder who has set an
+admirable mark of his own upon Melrose Abbey and other ecclesiastical
+fanes, and, as Sheriff of the Forest, built Newark Castle after he had,
+in jest or earnest, defied the authority of his patron, King James IV.;
+perhaps he was even the writer of the ballad. This is a pretty strong
+order on our faith; although it must be confessed that there is a
+singular mixture, in this fine old lay, of information on architecture,
+venerie, and local ownership of land; and the Outlaw is made to have all
+the best of the combat of wits and words, and of the bargain with which
+it ends. 'Name your lands,' cries the King, 'where'er they lie, and here
+I render them to thee'; and the Outlaw promptly responds:
+
+    '"Fair Philiphaugh is mine by right,
+      And Lewinshope still mine shall be,
+    Newark, Foulshiels, and Tinnis baith,
+      My bow and arrow purchased me.
+
+    And I have native steads to me,
+      And some by name I do not knaw;
+    The Hangingshaw and Newark Lee,
+      And mony mair in the Forest shaw."'
+
+Very different was the guerdon which Johnie Armstrong of Gilnockie got
+from King James the Fifth, when, in an evil hour, he came with a gallant
+company from his stronghold in Eskdale to meet that monarch, who had
+ridden with a strong force into the heart of the moss-troopers' country,
+intent on taming the marchmen. Well might the ladies 'look from their
+loft windows,' and sigh, 'God bring our men weel hame again!' as Johnie,
+and the six-and-thirty Armstrongs and Elliots in his train, ran their
+horses through Langholm howm in their haste to welcome their 'lawful
+king.' This expedition of 1529 has left its mark on ballad poetry as
+well as history; through the hanging of Cockburn of Henderland it gave
+occasion for the _Lament of the Border Widow_. But no incident in it
+made deeper impression on the popular memory--none seems to have caused
+more sorrow and reprobation--than the stringing up of the Laird of
+Gilnockie and his followers on the trees at Carlenrig, at the head of
+Teviot. A 'Johnie Armstrong's Dance' was popular when the _Complaynt of
+Scotland_ was written twenty years later; and Sir David Lyndsay, in one
+of his plays, makes his Pardoner hawk about, among his relics of saints,
+the cords of good hemp that hanged the unlucky laird of Gilnockie Hall,
+with the commendation that
+
+    'Wha'ever beis hangit in this cord
+      Neidis never to be drowned.'
+
+At the bar of judgment of the balladists, the deed was counted murder:
+
+    'Scotland's heart was ne'er sae wae
+      To see sae mony brave men die';
+
+and murder all the less pardonable, since the king who ordered it was
+himself an inspirer and, as some say, a writer of ballads. As is pointed
+out in the _Border Minstrelsy_, the ballad, in its account of the
+interview between the king and his troublesome subject, follows pretty
+closely the narrative of Pitscottie. 'What wants that knave that a king
+should have?' was the offended remark of James, when he saw the band
+approaching him in the bravery of their war-gear. And Johnie, when all
+his appeals and bribes proved to be vain, could also speak a frank word:
+
+    '"To seek het water beneath cauld ice,
+      Surely it is a great follie;
+    I have asked grace at a graceless face,
+      But there is nane for my men and me."'
+
+Whatever their misdeeds, Gilnockie and his men had certainly hard
+measure and short shrift. The king's courtiers, it is alleged, incited
+him to make a summary end of the Armstrongs; and he had not the biting
+answer ready which his father is said to have given to the 'keen laird
+of Buccleuch,' when that Border chieftain urged him to 'braid on with
+fire and sword' against the Outlaw of Ettrick Forest:
+
+    'Now haud thy tongue, Sir Walter Scott,
+      Nor speak of reif or felonie;
+    For had every honest man his coo,
+      A right puir clan thy name would be.'
+
+But when their own clan or dependants made appeal for help or vengeance,
+none were more prompt with the strong word and deed than the
+Scotts--witness, _Kinmont Willie_; witness also, _Jamie Telfer o' the
+Fair Dodhead_. When Jamie ran hot-foot to Branksome Hall with the news
+that the Captain of Bewcastle had ramshackled his house and driven his
+gear and stock, until
+
+    'There was naught left in the Fair Dodhead
+      But a greeting wife and bairnies three,'
+
+did not Buccleuch start up like an old roused lion?
+
+    '"Gar warn the water, braid and wide,
+      Gar warn it soon and hastilie!
+    They that winna ride for Telfer's kye,
+      Let them never look on the face o' me!"'
+
+And the chase goes on, from the Dodhead on the Ettrick until, at the
+fords of the Liddel, the enemy are brought to bay; and we have the fine
+picture of Auld Wat of Harden, the husband of the 'Flower of Yarrow,'
+and a forebear of the author of _Waverley_, as he 'grat for very rage'
+when Willie Scott, the son of his chief, lay slain by an English stroke:
+
+    'But he 's ta'en aff his good steel cap,
+      And thrice he 's waved it in the air.
+    The Dinley's snaw was ne'er mair white
+      Than the lyart locks of Harden's hair.'
+
+Vain was the offer by the Bewcastle raiders to men in such mood to take
+back the cattle that had been lifted:
+
+    'When they cam' to the Fair Dodhead,
+      They were a welcome sight to see!
+    For instead of his ain ten milk-kye,
+      Jamie Telfer has gotten thirty-and-three.'
+
+_Auld Maitland_ treats of an inroad on the opposite side of the country,
+of more ancient date and more formidable character. Its hero appears to
+have been a progenitor of that line of Lethington in East Lothian, and
+of Thirlstane, in Lauderdale, who, planted firmly on both sides of
+Lammermuir, produced in after-times warriors, statesmen, and even poets
+of note. Gavin Douglas places Maitland, with the 'auld beird grey,'
+among the legendary inmates of his 'Palace of Honour'; and Scott
+identifies him as a Sir Richard de Mautlant who, in the latter half of
+the thirteenth century, and probably during the Wars of Independence,
+held the ancestral lands by Leaderside, on the track of invading armies
+crossing the Tweed between Coldstream and Melrose, and holding in to
+Lothian by Soultra Hill. Accordingly, the ballad tells us that the
+English army, under King Edward, assembled on the Tyne:
+
+    'They lighted on the banks of Tweed,
+      And blew their fires so het,
+    And fired the Merse and Teviotdale
+      All in an evening late.
+
+    As they flared up o'er Lammermuir
+      They burned baith up and down,
+    Until they came to a darksome house,
+      Some call it Lauder town.'
+
+Many a foray from the same direction followed the same gait, their
+coming heralded by the bale-fires that flashed the signal from Hume
+Castle to Edgarhope (wrongly identified by Professor Veitch with
+Edgerston on Jed Water), and from Edgarhope to Soultra Edge. But
+memorable above all other Border raids recorded in song or story, is
+that encounter in which 'the Douglas and the Percy met,' and which has
+inspired perhaps the very finest of the historical ballads of each
+country. Moot points there are of locality, date, and circumstances; but
+it is generally accepted that the rhyme known for many centuries in
+Scotland as _The Battle of Otterburn_, and the English _Chevy Chase_ are
+versions, from opposite sides, of one event--a skirmish fought in the
+autumn of 1388 on Rede Water, between a band of Scots, under James, Earl
+of Douglas, returning home laden with spoil, and a body of English, led
+by Hotspur, the son of the Earl of Northumberland, in which Douglas was
+slain and young Harry Percy taken prisoner. It were as hard to decide
+between the merits of these famous old lays as to award the prize for
+prowess between the respective champions. But it may be noted, as a fine
+Borderer's trait, that each of the two ballads does full justice to the
+chivalry and fighting mettle of the enemy. It is to be observed also
+that they are different poems, and not merely versions of the same; and
+that _The Battle of Otterburn_ and the other racy and vigorous ballads
+of its class dealt with in this chapter, are of themselves sufficient to
+refute the arrogant dictum of Mr. Carew Hazlitt, that Scotland has no
+original ballad-poetry to speak of, and that what she calls her own are
+'chiefly English ballads, sprinkled with Northern provincialisms.'
+
+But while they are, as Scott says, different in essentials, the English
+and Scottish ballads have exchanged phrases and even verses, as the
+English and Scottish warriors exchanged strokes, and these of the best:
+
+    'When Percy wi' the Douglas met,
+      I wat they were full fain;
+    They swakked their swords till sair they swet,
+      And the blood ran doon like rain,'
+
+may lack some of the picturesqueness of the corresponding passage of
+_Chevy Chase_. But nothing, at least in Scottish eyes, can surpass the
+simple majesty and pathos of the last words of Douglas--words that sound
+all the sadder since Walter Scott repeated them, when he also had almost
+fought his last battle and was wounded unto death:
+
+    '"My nephew good," the Douglas said,
+      "What recks the death o' ane?
+    Last night I dreamed a dreary dream,
+      And I ken the day 's thy ain.
+
+    "My wound is deep, I fain would sleep;
+      Take thou the vanward o' the three,
+    And hide me by the bracken bush
+      That grows upon the lily lee.
+
+    "O bury me by the bracken bush,
+      Beneath the blooming brier;
+    Let never living mortal ken
+      A kindly Scot lies here."'
+
+The Historical Ballad of Border chivalry touches its highest and
+strongest note in these words; they will stand, like Tantallon, proof
+against the tooth of Time as long as Scotland has a heart to feel and
+ears to hear.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+CONCLUSION
+
+    Though long on Time's dark whirlpool tossed,
+    The song is saved; the bard is lost.
+
+        _The Ettrick Shepherd._
+
+
+Ballad poetry is a phrase of elastic and variable meaning. In the
+national repertory there are Ballads Satirical, Polemical, and
+Political, and even Devotional and Doctrinal, of as early date as many
+of the songs inspired by the spirit of Love, War, and Romance. Among
+them they represent the diverse strands that are blended in the Scottish
+character--the sombre and the bright; the prose and the poetry. The one
+or the other has predominated in the expression of the genius of the
+nation in verse, according to the circumstances and mood of the time.
+But neither has ever been really absent; they are the opposite sides of
+the same shield. It is not proposed to enter here into the ballad
+literature of the didactic type--the 'ballads with a purpose'--either by
+way of characterisation or example. In further distinction from the
+authors of the specimens of old popular song, the writers of many or
+most of them are known to us, at least by name, and are among the most
+honoured and familiar in our literature.
+
+Towards the unlettered bards of the traditional ballads, who 'saved
+other names, but left their own unsung,' the more serious and
+self-conscious race of poets who wrote satire and allegory and homily on
+the same model have generally thought themselves entitled to assume an
+attitude of superiority and even of disapproval. The verse of those
+self-taught rhymers was rude and simple, and wanting in those
+conventional ornaments, borrowed from classic or other sources, which
+for the time being were the recognised hallmarks of poesy; the moral
+lessons it taught were not apparent, nor even discoverable. It is
+curious to note how early this tone of reprobation, of contempt, or at
+best of kindly condescension on the part of the official priesthood of
+letters towards the humble tribe of balladists asserts itself, and how
+long it endures.
+
+Even Edmund Spenser, as quoted by Scott in the _Minstrelsy_, reproves
+the Irish bards and rhymsters, as he might have done their Scottish
+brethren, because 'for little reward or the share of a stolen cow' they
+'seldom use to choose the doings of good men for the arguments of their
+poems,' but, on the contrary, those of such men as live 'lawlessly and
+licentiously upon stealths and spoyles,' whom they praise to the people,
+and set up as an example to young men. A poetaster of the beginning of
+the seventeenth century prays his printer that his book 'be not with
+your Ballads mixt,' and that 'it come not brought on pedlars' backs to
+common Fairs'--a prayer fulfilled to the letter. And down even to our
+own century, a host of collectors, adaptors, and imitators have spoken
+patronisingly of the elder ballads, and foisted on them additions and
+ornaments that have not always or often been improvements.
+
+The whirligig of time has brought in its revenges; and the final
+judgment passed by posterity upon the respective claims of the formal
+verse and the 'unpremeditated lay' of earlier centuries, has in large
+measure reversed that of the age in which they were born. The former,
+and particularly where it undertook to scourge the vices, the heresies,
+and the follies of the period, lacks entirely that air of simplicity and
+spontaneity--that 'wild-warlock' lilt, that 'wild happiness of thought
+and expression'--which, in the phrase of Robert Burns, marks 'our native
+manner and language' in ballad poetry certainly not less than in lyrical
+song. The laureated bard, honoured of the Court and blessed by the
+Church, is deposed from his pride of place, in the affections and
+remembrance of the people at least, while the chant of the unknown
+minstrel of 'the hedgerow and the field' goes sounding on in deeper and
+widening volume through the great heart of the race, and is hailed as
+the one true ballad voice.
+
+Among the subjects which the Moral and Satirical Ballad selected for
+censure were, it will be seen, the themes and the heroes of the humble
+broadsheets sung at the common fairs and carried in the pedlar's pack.
+Nor are we to wonder at this. Much of the contents of that pack is
+better forgotten. Much even of what has been preserved might have been
+allowed to drop into oblivion, without loss to posterity and with gain
+to the character and reputation of the 'good old times.' The
+balladists--those of the early broadsheets at least--could be gross on
+occasion; although, it must be owned, not more gross than the dramatists
+of Elizabethan and Restoration times, and even the novelists of last
+century, sometimes deigned to be. In particular, they made the mistake,
+of venerable date and not quite unknown to this day, of confounding
+humour with coarseness. A humorous ballad is usually a thing to be
+fingered gingerly. Yet, although (partly for the reason hinted at)
+humour has been said not to be a strongly marked element of the flower
+of our ballad poetry, there are many of the best of them that have
+imbedded in them a rich and genuine vein of comic wit or broad fun; and
+there are also what may be classed as Humorous Ballads proper (or
+improper as the case may be), which reflect more plainly and frankly,
+perhaps, than any other department of our literature, the customs,
+character, and amusements of the commonalty, and have exercised an
+important influence on the national poets and poetry of a later day.
+
+Of the blending of the humorous with the romantic, an excellent example
+is found in the ballad of _Earl Richard and the Carl's Daughter_. The
+Princess, disguised in beggar's duds, keeps on the hook the deluded and
+disgusted knight, who has unwillingly taken her up behind him, and with
+wilful and lively wit draws for him pictures of the squalid home and
+fare with which she is familiar, until it is her good time and pleasure
+to undeceive him:
+
+    'She said, "Good-e'en, ye nettles tall,
+      Where ye grow at the dyke;
+    If the auld carline my mother was here
+      Sae weel 's she wad ye pike.
+
+    How she wad stap ye in her poke,
+      I wot she wadna fail;
+    And boil ye in her auld brass pan,
+      And o' ye mak' good kail."
+
+           .       .       .       .       .
+
+    "Awa', awa', ye ill woman,
+      Your vile speech grieveth me;
+    When ye hide sae little for yoursel'
+      Ye 'll hide far less for me."
+
+    "Gude-e'en, gude-e'en, ye heather berries,
+      As ye grow on yon hill;
+    If the auld carline and her bags were here,
+      I wot she would get her fill.
+
+    Late, late at night I knit our pokes,
+      Wi' four-and-twenty knots;
+    And in the morn, at breakfast-time
+      I 'll carry the keys o' your locks."
+
+           .       .       .       .       .
+
+    "But if you are a carl's daughter,
+      As I take you to be,
+    Where did you get the gay clothing
+      In greenwood was on thee?"
+
+    "My mother she 's a poor woman,
+      But she nursed earl's children three,
+    And I got it from a foster-sister,
+      To beguile such sparks as thee."'
+
+Of the ballads descriptive of old country sports and merry-making that
+have come down to us, the most famous are _Christ's Kirk on the Green_
+and _Peblis to the Play_. They lead us back to times when life in
+Scotland was not such a 'serious' thing as it afterwards became--when,
+under the patronage of the Court or of the Church, Miracle-plays or
+Moralities were played on the open sward in such places of resort for
+gentle and simple as Falkland and Stirling and Peebles and Cupar; and
+the strain of the more solemn mumming was relieved for the benefit of
+the common folks, by rough jests, horse-play, and dancing, in which
+their betters freely joined. No doubt it was a piece of sage church and
+state policy to keep the minds of the people off the dangerous questions
+that began to be stirring in them, by aid of these scenes of 'dancing
+and derray,' and of almost Rabelaisian fits of mirth and laughter, the
+savour of which remained long after they had been placed under the ban
+of a sterner ecclesiastical rule.
+
+Leslie in Fife and Leslie in Aberdeen are competitors for having given
+the inspiration to _Christ's Kirk on the Green_, to which Allan Ramsay
+afterwards added a second part in the same vein. But whether these
+passages of boisterous merriment, in which 'licht-skirtit lasses and
+girning gossips' play their part happed under the green Lomond or at
+Dunideer, there can be no question of the national popularity which the
+piece long enjoyed. Pope declared that a Scot would fight in his day for
+its superiority over English ballads; and the author of _Tullochgorum_,
+in a letter to Robert Burns, tells us that at the age of twelve he had
+it by heart, and had even tried to turn it into Latin verse. In _Peblis
+to the Play_, the fun is not less nimble although it is a whit more
+restrained; there is an infectious spirit of spring-time and gaiety in
+the strain that sings of the festal gathering at Beltane, when burgesses
+and country folks fared forth 'be firth and forest,' all 'graithed full
+gay' to take part in the sports. 'All the wenches of the west' were up
+and stirring by cock-crow, selecting, rejecting, or comparing their
+tippets, hoods, and curches. Not only Peebles, but
+
+    'Hop-Kailzie, and Cardronow,
+      Gaderit out thick-fald,
+    With "Hey and how rohumbelow"
+      The young folk were full bald.
+    The bag-pipe blew, and they out-threw
+      Out of the townis untald,
+    Lord, what a shout was them amang
+      Quhen thai were ower the wald
+                        Their west
+    Of Peblis to the play!'
+
+From a phrase used by John Major, it has been suggested that James I. of
+Scots was the writer of this poem; and a note on the Bannatyne MS. of
+_Christ's Kirk_ attributes that companion poem to the same royal
+authorship. In spite of the adverse judgment pronounced by Professors
+Guest and Skeat, it does not seem an inconceivable thing that the
+monarch who wrote the _King's Quair_, and whose daughter kissed the
+lips of Alain Chartier as the reward of France for his sweet singing,
+should have written these strains descriptive of rural jollity in
+localities where the court and sovereign are known to have often
+resorted for hunting and other diversion. The cast and language of the
+poems appear, however, to belong to a later date; and the quaint stanza,
+afterwards employed in a modified form with such effect by Fergusson and
+Burns, is that used by Alexander Scot in _The Justing at the Drum_, and
+in other burlesque pieces of the early or middle period of the sixteenth
+century.
+
+A much more taking tradition is that which assigns them to the
+adventure-loving 'Commons King,' James V. They are thoroughly after the
+'humour'--using the word in the Elizabethan as well as in the ordinary
+sense--of the wandering 'Red Tod'; who has also been held to be the
+inspirer, if not the author, of those excellent humorous ballads--among
+the best of their kind to be found in any language--_The Gaberlunzie
+Man_ and _The Jolly Beggar_.
+
+From the moral point of view, these pieces may, perhaps, come under
+Spenser's condemnation of the rhymers who sing of amatory adventures in
+which love is no sooner asked than it is granted. But the balladist
+carries everything before him by the verve and good humour and pawky wit
+of his song. There are touches worthy of the comedy spirit of Moliere in
+the description, in _The Gaberlunzie Man_, of the good-wife's alternate
+blessing and banning as she makes her morning discoveries about the
+'silly poor man' whom she has lodged over night:
+
+    'She gaed to the bed whair the beggar lay;
+    The strae was cauld, he was away;
+    She clapt her hands, cry'd, "Dulefu' day!
+      For some of our gear will be gane."
+
+    Some ran to coffer and some to kist,
+    But nought was stown that could be mist,
+    She danced her lane, cry'd, "Praise be blest,
+      I 've lodg'd a leal poor man.
+    Since naething awa, as we can learn,
+    The kirn 's to kirn, and milk to yearn,
+    Gae but the house, lass, and waken my bairn,
+      And bid her come quickly ben."
+
+    The servant gaed where the dochter lay--
+    The sheets were cauld, she was away;
+    And fast to the goodwife did say
+      "She 's aff wi' the gaberlunzie man."
+    "O fy gar ride, and fy gar rin,
+    And haste ye, find these traitors again;
+    For she 's be burnt, and he 's be slain,
+      The wearifu' gaberlunzie man."'
+
+_The Jolly Beggar_ is a variation of the same tale from the book of the
+moonlight rovings of the 'Guidman o' Ballengeich,' with the same vigour
+and lively humour, and with the bloom of the old ballad minstrelsy upon
+it besides:
+
+    'He took his horn from his side,
+      And blew baith loud and shrill,
+    And four-and-twenty belted knights
+      Came skipping o'er the hill.
+
+    And he took out his little knife,
+      Loot a' his duddies fa';
+    And he stood the brawest gentleman
+      That was amang them a'.'
+
+Other excellent specimens of old Scottish humour have come down to us in
+ballad form, some of them made more familiar to our ears in modernised
+versions or paraphrases in which, along with the roughnesses, much of
+the force and quaint drollery of the originals has been smoothed away.
+Of such is _The Wyf of Auchtermuchty_, a Fife ballad, full of local
+colour and character, the production of 'Sir John Moffat,' a sixteenth
+century priest, who loved a merry jest, and of whom we know barely more
+than the name. With so many other precious fragments of our national
+poetry, it is preserved in the collection of George Bannatyne, the
+namefather of the Bannatyne Club, who beguiled the tedium of his
+retirement in time of plague by copying down the popular verse of his
+day. It is the progenitor of _John Grumlie_, and gives us a lively
+series of pictures of the housewifery and the husbandry, as well as the
+average human nature of the time, class, and locality to which it
+belongs. The proverb, 'The more the haste the less the speed,' has never
+been more humorously illustrated than in the troubles of the lazy
+guidman who 'weel could tipple oot a can, and neither lovit hunger nor
+cauld,' and who fancied that he could more easily play the housewife's
+part:
+
+    'Then to the kirn that he did stour,
+      And jumbled at it till he swat;
+    When he had jumblit ane lang hour,
+      The sorrow crap of butter he gat.
+
+    Albeit nae butter he could get,
+      Yet he was cumbered wi' the kirn;
+    And syne he het the milk ower het,
+      That sorrow spark o' it wad yearn.'
+
+Of the same racy domestic type are the still popular, _The Barrin' o'
+the Door, Hame cam' oor Guidman at e'en_, to which, with needless
+ingenuity, it has been sought to give a Jacobite significance, and
+_Allan o' Maut_, an allegorical account of the genesis of 'barley bree.'
+Of this last, also, Bannatyne has noted a version which was probably in
+vogue in the first half of the sixteenth century. Even the hand of
+Burns, who has produced, in _John Barleycorn_, the final form of the
+ballad, could not give us more vigorous and trenchant Scots than is
+contained in the verses of this venerable rhyme in Jamieson's
+collection:
+
+    'He first grew green, syne grew he white,
+    Syne a' men thocht that he was ripe;
+    And wi' crookit gullies and hafts o' tree,
+    They 've hew'd him down, right dochtilie.
+
+           .       .       .       .       .
+
+    The hollin souples, that were sae snell,
+    His back they loundert, mell for mell,
+    Mell for mell, and baff for baff,
+    Till his hide flew round his lugs like chaff.'
+
+Three (if not four) generations of the Semples of Beltrees carried the
+tradition of this homely type of native poetry, with its strong gust and
+relish of life, and the Dutch-like breadth and fidelity of its pictures
+of the character and humours of common folk, over the period from the
+Scottish Reformation to the Revolution; and are remembered by such
+pieces as _The Packman's Paternoster_, _The Piper o' Kilbarchan_, _The
+Blithesome Bridal_, and, best and most characteristic of all, _Maggie
+Lauder_.
+
+The 'business of the Reformation of Religion' did not go well with
+ballad-making or with the roystering fun of the fair and the play. In
+the stern temper to which the nation was wrought in the struggle to cast
+out abuses in the faith and practice of the Church and to assert liberty
+of judgment, the feigned adventures of knights and the sorrows of
+love-crossed maids seemed to cease for a time to exercise their spell
+over the fancy of the people. The open-air gatherings and junketings on
+feast and saints' days, with their attendant mirth and music, were too
+closely associated with the old ecclesiastical rule, and had too many
+scandals and excesses connected with them, to escape censure from the
+new Mentors and conscience-keepers of the nation. When, a little later,
+the spirit of Puritanism came in, mirth and music, and more particularly
+the dance, became themselves suspect. They savoured of the follies of
+this world, and were among the wiles most in use by the Wicked One in
+snaring souls. The flowers were cut down along with the weeds by those
+root-and-branch men--only to spring up again, both of them, in due
+season, more luxuriantly than ever.
+
+There were other and cogent reasons why the exploits of 'Jock o' the
+Side' and his confreres should be frowned upon and listened to with
+impatience. The time for Border feud and skirmish was already well-nigh
+past. Industry and knowledge and the pacific arts of life were making
+progress. The moss-trooper was already becoming an anachronism and a
+pestilent nuisance, to be put down by the relentless arm of the law,
+before the Union of the Crowns. Half a century or more before that
+event, this opinion had been formed of the reiving clans by their
+quieter and more thoughtful neighbours, as is manifest from the biting
+allusions of Sir David Lyndsay and Sir Richard Maitland. But after King
+James's going to England, even the balladists were chary of lifting up a
+voice in praise of the freebooters of the former Marches. Men were busy
+finding and fitting themselves to new ideals of patriotism and duty. The
+gift and the taste for ballad poetry disappeared, or rather went into
+retirement for a time, to reappear in other forms at a later call of
+loyalty and romanticism.
+
+The _Gude and Godlie Ballates_ of the Wedderburns had been deliberately
+produced and circulated by the Reformers, with the avowed intention, as
+Sheriff Mackay says, of 'driving the old amatory and romantic ballads
+out of the field, and substituting spiritual songs, set to the same
+tunes--much as revivalists of the present day have adopted older secular
+melodies.' But nothing enduring is to be done, in the field of poetry,
+by mere dint of determination and good intent. If the older songs
+succumbed for a time to the new spiritual melodies, we may feel sure
+that it was not without a struggle. On the Borders and in the Highlands,
+the Original Adam asserted himself, in deed and in song, long after the
+more sober mind of Fife, Lanark, and the West Country had given itself
+up to the solution of the new theological and ecclesiastical problems
+which time and change had brought to the nation. The Reformers
+complained that the fighting clans of the Western Marches could only
+with difficulty be induced to turn their thoughts from the hereditary
+business of the quarrel of the Kingdoms to take up instead the quarrel
+of the Kirk. Even so late as the Covenanting period, Richard Cameron
+found it hard work 'to set the fire of hell to the tails' of the
+Annandale men. They came to the field meetings 'out of mere curiosity,
+to see a minister preach in a tent, and people sit on the ground'--in a
+spirit not unlike that in which the people used to gather at _Peblis to
+the Play_ or _Christ's Kirk on the Green_, to mingle a pinch of piety
+and priestly Moralities with a bellyful of carnal delights. It was not
+until the preacher had denounced them as 'offspring of thieves and
+robbers,' that some of them began to 'get a merciful cast.'
+
+This, too, changed in the course of time, and having once caught fire,
+the religious enthusiasm of the marchmen kindled into a brilliant glow,
+or smouldered with a fervent heat. They flung themselves into the front
+of Kirk controversy, as they did also into more peaceable pursuits, such
+as sheep-farming and tweed manufacture, with the same hearty energy
+which aforetime was expended upon raids into Cumberland and
+Northumberland.
+
+But through all the changes and distractions of the three centuries
+since the Warden's men met with merriment and parted with blows at the
+Reidswire, the old ballad music--the voice of the blood; the very speech
+and message of the hills and streams--has sounded like a softly-played
+accompaniment to the strenuous labour of the race with hand and head--a
+reminder of the men and the thoughts of 'the days of other years.' At
+times, in the strife of Church or State, or in the chase of gain, the
+magic notes of this 'Harp of the North' may have sunk low, may have
+become nigh inaudible. But in the pauses when the nation could listen to
+the rhythmic beat of its own heart, the sound has made itself heard and
+felt like the noise of many waters or the sough of the wind in the
+tree-tops; it is music that can never die out of the land. Its echo has
+never been wholly missed by Dee and Earn and Girvan; certainly never by
+Yarrow and Teviot and Tweed. The 'Spiritual Songs'--the 'Gude and Godlie
+Ballates'--are lost, or are remembered only by the antiquary; not indeed
+because they were spiritual, or because they were written by worthy men
+with good intent--for the Scottish Psalms, sung to their traditional
+melodies, touch a still deeper chord in the natural breast than the
+ballads--but because they lacked the sap of life, the beauty and the
+passion of nature's own teaching, which only can give immortality to
+song. There is a 'Harp of the Covenant', and in it there are piercing
+wails wrung from a people almost driven frantic with suffering and
+oppression. But the popular lays of the civil wars and commotions of
+the seventeenth century are few in number, and singularly wanting in
+those touches of grace and tenderness and kindly humour that somehow
+accompany the very roughest and most trenchant of the earlier ballads,
+like the bloom and fragrance that adorn the bristling thickets of the
+native whin on the slopes of the Eildons or Arthur Seat. The times were
+harsh and crabbed, and the song they yielded was like unto themselves.
+There are ballads of the _Battle of Pentland_, of _Bothwell Brig_, of
+_Killiecrankie_, and, to make a leap into another century, of
+_Sheriffmuir_. But they are memorable for the passion of hatred and
+scorn that is in them, rather than for their merits as poetry--for
+girdings, from one side or the other, at 'cruel Claver'se' and the
+red-shanked Highlandmen that slew the hope of the Covenant, or at the
+
+    'Riven hose and ragged hools,
+    Sour milk and girnin' gools,
+    Psalm beuks and cutty stools'
+
+of Whiggery.
+
+After a time of dearth, however, Scottish poetry began to revive; and
+one of the earliest signs was the attention that began to be paid to the
+anonymous ballads of the country. It is curious that the first printed
+collection of them should have been almost contemporary with that
+merging of the Parliaments of the two kingdoms, which, according to the
+fears and beliefs of the time, was to have made an end of the
+nationality and identity of the smaller and poorer of the countries. It
+was in 1706--the year before the Union--that James Watson's _Serious and
+Comic Scots Poems_ made their appearance, prompted, conceivably, by the
+impulse to grasp at what seemed to be in danger of being lost.
+
+Of infinitely greater importance in the history of our ballad literature
+was the appearance, some eighteen years later, of Allan Ramsay's
+_Evergreen_ and _Tea-Table Miscellany_. It was a fresh dawning of
+Scottish poetry. Warmth, light, and freedom seemed to come again into
+the frozen world. The blithe and genial spirit of the black-avised
+little barber-poet was itself the greatest imaginable contrast to the
+soured Puritanism and prim formalism that for half a century and more
+had infested the national letters. But the author of _The Gentle
+Shepherd_ himself--and small blame to him--did not fully comprehend the
+nature and extent of his mission. He did not wholly rid himself from the
+prevalent idea that the simple natural turn of the old verse was naked
+rudeness which it was but decent and charitable to deck with the
+ornaments of the time before it could be made presentable in polite
+society; indeed he himself, in later editions especially, tried his hand
+boldly at emendation, imitation, and continuation.
+
+For a generation or two longer, the ballad suffered from these
+attentions of the modish muse. Yet the original spark of inspiration was
+not extinct; in the Border valleys especially--its native country, as
+we have called it--there were strains that 'bespoke the harp of ancient
+days.' Of Lady Grizel Baillie's lilts, composed at 'Polwarth on the
+Green' or at Mellerstain--classic scenes of song and of legend, both of
+them--mention has been made; they have on them the very dew of homely
+shepherd life, closed about by the hills, of 'forest charms decayed and
+pastoral melancholy.' The Wandering Violer, also, 'Minstrel Burne,' from
+whom Scott may have taken the hint of the 'last of all the bards who
+sang of Border chivalry'--caught an echo, in _Leader Haughs_, of the
+grief and changes 'which fleeting Time procureth.'
+
+    'For many a place stands in hard case
+      Where blyth folks ken'd nae sorrow,
+    With Humes that dwelt on Leaderside,
+      And Scotts that wonned in Yarrow.'
+
+His song, with its notes of native sweetness and its artificial
+garnishing of classic allusions, marks the passing of the old ballad
+style into the new.
+
+Jane Elliot, too, a descendant of that Gibbie Elliot--'the laird of
+Stobs, I mean the same'--who refused to come to the succour of Telfer's
+kye, listened to the murmuring of the 'mining Rule' and looked up
+towards the dark skirt and threatening top of Ruberslaw, as she crooned
+the old fragment which her fancy shaped into that lilting before
+daybreak of the lasses at the ewe-milking, turned ere night into wailing
+for the lost Flowers of the Forest. Her contemporary, Mrs. Cockburn,
+who wrote the more hackneyed set of the same Border lament, was of the
+ancient race of Rutherford of Wauchope in the same romantic Border
+district,--a district wherein James Thomson, of _The Seasons_, spent his
+childhood from almost his earliest infancy, and where the prototype of
+Scott's Dandie Dinmont, James Davidson of 'Note o' the Gate,' sleeps
+sound under a green heap of turf. To trace the Teviotdale dynasty of
+song further in the female line, Mrs. Cockburn's niece, Mrs. Scott, was
+that 'guidwife o' Wauchope-house,' who addressed an ode to her 'canty,
+witty, rhyming ploughman,' Robert Burns, with an invitation to visit her
+on the Border--an invitation which the poet accepted, and on the way
+thither, as he relates, chanced upon 'Esther (Easton), a very remarkable
+woman for reciting poetry of all kinds, and sometimes making Scots
+doggerel of her own.'
+
+Meanwhile, in other parts of the country, the search for and the study
+of the remains of the old and popular poetry was making progress. With
+this had come a truer appreciation of its beauty and its spirit, and the
+return of a measure of the earlier gift of spontaneous song. The fancy
+of Scotland was kindled by the tale of the '45. Her poetic heart beat in
+sympathy with the 'Lost Cause'--after it was finally lost; even while
+her reason and judgment remained, on the whole, true to the side and to
+the principles that were victorious. Men who were almost Jacobin in
+their opinion--Robert Burns is a prime example--became Jacobite when
+they donned their singing robes. The faults and misdeeds of the Stewarts
+were forgotten in their misfortunes. In the gallant but ruinous 'cast
+for the crown' of the native dynasty, the national lyre found once more
+a theme for song and ballad. 'Drummossie moor, Drummossie day' drew
+laments as for another Flodden; and 'Johnnie Cope,' in his flight from
+the field of Prestonpans, was pursued more relentlessly by mocking
+rhymes than by Highland claymores.
+
+A rush of Jacobite song, which had the great good fortune to be wedded
+to music not less witching than itself, followed rather than attended
+the Rebellion; and has become among the most precious and permanent of
+the nation's possessions in the sphere of poetry. Whichever side had the
+better in the sword-play, there can be no doubt which has won the
+triumph in the piping. Song and music have given the Stewart cause its
+revenge against fortune; and Prince Charlie, and not Cumberland, will
+remain for all time the hero of the cycle of song that commemorates the
+last romantic episode in our domestic annals. Jacobite poetry has been
+lyrical for the most part. But the ballad--narrative in form and
+dramatic in spirit--has not been neglected.
+
+In a host of singers, Caroline Oliphant, Baroness Nairne, wears the
+laurel crown of the Jacobite Muse, and Strathearn is the chief centre of
+inspiration. But the authoress of _The Auld Hoose_, and _The Land o' the
+Leal_, also wrote ballads of cheery and pawky, yet 'genty' humour that
+have caught and held the popular ear, as witness the immortal _Laird of
+Cockpen_. Hamilton of Bangour, who was 'out' in the '45, had struck anew
+the lyre of Yarrow in _Busk ye, busk ye!_ Fife could already 'cock her
+crest' over Elizabeth Halkett, Lady Wardlaw, a balladist whose verse,
+acknowledged and unacknowledged, had many genuine touches 'of the
+antique manner;' and Lady Anne Barnard, a granddaughter of Colin, Earl
+of Balcarres, whose career was one of the romances of the '15 and of the
+House of Lindsay, was able to tell Sir Walter Scott, so late as 1823,
+the story of the conception and birth of her _Auld Robin Gray_, which
+also, on its first anonymous appearance, was taken by some as 'a very,
+very ancient ballad, composed perhaps by David Rizzio.' As with so many
+other ballads--perhaps as with most of them--the inspiration of the
+words was caught from a beautiful and still older air--'an ancient
+Scotch melody,' says Lady Anne, 'of which I was passionately fond; Sophy
+Johnstone used to sing it to us at Balcarres.' The date of this, perhaps
+the sweetest of our modern ballads, is fixed approximately by the gifted
+writer 'as soon after the close of the year 1771'--perhaps the first
+approach that can be made to the timing a ballad's birth.
+
+Walter Scott, also, was born in the latter half of 1771. Burns was then
+fifteen years of age, 'beardless, young, and blate,' but already, as he
+wrote to the 'guidwife of Wauchope-house,' with
+
+    'The elements o' sang
+      In formless jumble right an' wrang
+    Wild floating in his brain.'
+
+Already the wish was 'strongly heaving the breast' of that young
+Ayrshire ploughman,
+
+    'That I, for poor auld Scotland's sake
+    Some usefu' plan or beuk could make,
+      Or sing a sang at least.'
+
+Galloway had by this time taken up again its rough old lyre. Away in the
+North--in the Mearns and in Buchan, old homes of the ballad--the
+Reverend John Skinner had written his genial songs of _Tullochgorum_,
+_The Ewie wi' the Crookit Horn_ and the rest, that seem to thrill with
+the piercing and stirring notes of fiddle and pipes, being moved
+thereto, as he has told us, by his daughters, 'who, being all good
+singers, plagued me for words to their favourite tunes.' Fergusson was
+celebrating, in an old stanza, shortly to be made world-famous, the high
+jinks on Leith Links. Everywhere, from the Moray Firth to the Cheviots,
+and from the East Neuk of Fife to Maidenkirk, there were preludings for
+the new and splendid burst of Scottish song, that by and by broke from
+the banks of Ayr and Doon. The service rendered by the genius of Burns
+in quickening and purifying Scottish song and ballad poetry has often
+been acknowledged. It was, indeed, beyond all measure and praise. But
+recognition, has not, perhaps, been made so fully and frequently of what
+our 'King of Song' owed to the popular poetry of country people and
+elder times--and notably to the ballads--that have been handed down by
+memory rather than books. His was not an isolated phenomenon, blazing up
+meteor-like without visible cause or prompting. His poetry is rather the
+culminating effect of an impulse that had been making itself felt for
+generations. It was like one of those grand bale-fires of the days of
+peril and watching, whose sudden gleam made the blood stir in the veins,
+and turned men's faces skywards, but which caught its message from
+distant points of light that to us seem almost swallowed in the
+surrounding darkness.
+
+Burns had an inimitable ear for ballad feeling and for ballad rhythm and
+music. But, except for some vigorous satiric, political, and
+bacchanalian chants of his own, and the recasting of a few of the
+old-fashioned and lively rhymes like _The Carl o' Kellyburn Braes_ that
+were not out of the need of being cleaned and furbished to please a more
+fastidious age, he could scarcely be called a ballad writer. His special
+sphere in the restoration and preservation of the old was in lyrical
+poetry. What Robert Burns achieved for the songs, however, Walter Scott
+did for the ballads and prose legends of Scotland. The appearance of the
+_Border Minstrelsy_ makes 1802 the red-letter year in the later annals
+of the Scottish Ballad. More than twenty years before, the little lame
+boy, with the good blood of two Border clans, the Scotts and the
+Rutherfords, in his veins, had lain on the braes of Sandyknowe, and had
+drunk in through all his senses the history and romance of the
+Borderland. He had heard from the 'aged hind,' or at the 'winter
+hearth,' the old tales of woe and mirth; wild conjurings of superstition
+or real events that, although nearer then by a hundred years than they
+are to-day, had already been magnified, distorted, glorified in passing
+through the medium of the popular memory. His dreaming fancy did the
+rest. Looking from his point of vantage across the fair valley of the
+Tweed to the blue chain of Cheviot, every notch in which was 'a gate and
+passage of the thief,' every fold below it, the site of some battle or
+story of old,
+
+    'Over Tweed's fair flood, and Mertoun's wood,
+      And all down Teviotdale,'
+
+he was able to repeople the scene as it was when ballad romance was not
+only written but lived:
+
+    'I marvelled as the aged hind
+    With some strange tale bewitched my mind,
+    Of forayers, who with headlong force
+    Down from that strength had spurred their horse.
+
+           .       .       .       .       .
+
+    And ever, by the winter hearth,
+    Old tales I heard of woe or mirth,
+    Of lovers' slights, of ladies charms,
+    Of witches' spells, of warriors' arms;
+    Of patriot battles won of old
+    By Wallace wight and Bruce the bold.'
+
+There could not have been a more 'meet nurse for a poetic child' than
+the green slopes, the black rocks, and the grey keep, reflected in its
+still 'lochan,' of Scott's ancestral home at Sandyknowe. Dryburgh,
+Melrose, and Kelso, are hidden in the valley below. The huge square
+tower of Hume--'Willie Wastle's' castle--stands on the same sky-line as
+Smailholm peel itself, keeping guard along with it over the passes and
+marches of the ancient Scottish Kingdom. Wrangholm is near by, where St.
+Cuthbert dreamed and played boyish sports before he set forth on his
+mission to christianise Northumbria. Bemerside, the Broom o' the
+Cowdenknowes, and the Rhymer's Tower are not far off; Huntly Bank is
+also where True Thomas lay alone listening to the throstle and the jay,
+under the Eildon tree, and
+
+    'Was war of a lady gay
+    Come rydyng ouyr a fair le';
+
+Mellerstain, whence the hero of _James Haitlie_ rode to find favour in
+the eyes of the king's daughter, and where Grizel Hume and the
+Mellerstain Maid afterwards sung notes as wild and sweet and fresh as
+ever came from fairyland; and many a famous spot besides. The
+three-headed Eildons are in sight, with Dunion, Ruberslaw, Penielheugh,
+Minto Crags, Lilliard's Edge, and all the Border high places. Here
+Scott's poetic fancy was born; and he paid it only to the tribute that
+was due when he made it the scene of the finest of the modern ballads of
+its class, the _Eve of St. John_. As a shrine of pilgrimage for the
+lover of ballad lore, Smailholm and Sandyknowe should rank next after,
+if they should not take precedence of the Vale of Yarrow. Six years
+before Scott's birth, while Burns was just a toddler, Bishop Percy's
+_Reliques_ had seen the light. The chief gathering ground of this
+celebrated collection was on the English side of the Border, but was not
+confined to ballad poetry. But it brought to some of the choicest of our
+ballads, such as _Sir Patrick Spens_, a fame and vogue such as they had
+never before enjoyed in the world without; and it profoundly influenced
+the poetic thought and taste of Scotland, as of every land where song
+was loved and English speech was spoken. One effect was seen in the more
+strictly Scottish collections of fragments of ballad verse that began
+soon after to issue from the press. Herd's, the 'first classical
+collection of Scottish songs and ballads,' as Scott calls it, appeared
+in 1769; that of Lord Hailes 1770; and Pinkerton's in 1781 and 1783. The
+publication in 1787 of the first volume of Johnson's _Museum_ was one of
+the fruitful results to the national poetry and music of the visit of
+Robert Burns to Edinburgh; but the impulse that brought it to the light
+can be traced back by sure lines to Percy. Ritson's learned labours in a
+still wider field came forth between 1780 and 1794; and Sibbald's
+_Chronicle_ was of the same year as the _Border Minstrelsy_.
+
+The age of ballad collection and collation had fairly set in. But this
+does not deprive the _Minstrelsy_ of the praise that, with the beginning
+of a new century, it ensured that the search for and rescue from
+oblivion of the old ballads should thenceforth be a business which, not
+alone the antiquary and the poet, but the whole people should make their
+concern. Jamieson's _Popular Ballads_ followed in 1806; and, after a
+pause, filled up with the appearance of fresh volumes and fresh editions
+of the earlier collections, the works of Kinloch, Motherwell, and Buchan
+came with a rush, in the years 1827-8.
+
+Of these, and other repertories of the national ballads, the number is
+legion, and the merits and methods as varied and diverse. There is not
+space to discuss and compare them, even were discussion and comparison
+part of the present plan. Such treatment is apt to reduce a book on
+ballads and balladists to what Charles G. Leland terms 'mere logarithmic
+tables of variants.' First came the harvesters; and then those who were
+content to glean where the others had left. As matter of course and of
+necessity the readings, and even the structure of the pieces picked up
+from oral recitation and singing, presented endless points of difference
+according to the locality and to the individual singer or collector. As
+has been said, each old piece of popular poetry, before it has been
+fixed in print, and even after, takes a certain part of its colour and
+character from the minds and memories through which it has been
+strained. As an illustration of this, in another field, one might
+mention that Pastor Hurt, when he set about, a few years ago, gathering
+the fragments of Esthonian folk literature, obtained contributions from
+633 different collectors, most of them simple peasants, and as the
+result of three and a half years' work, he brought together 'of epics,
+lyrics, wedding songs, etc., upwards of 20,000 specimens; of tales about
+3000; of proverbs about 18,000; of riddles, about 20,000, besides a
+large collection of magical formulae, superstitions, and the like.' These
+figures include variants of the same tale or ballad theme, of which
+there were in some cases as many as 160.
+
+The Scottish ballads may scarce be so multitudinous and protean a host
+as this. But the search for them, and the choice of them when
+discovered, have given infinite exercise to the industry, the judgment,
+and the patience of successive editors; and literature has no more
+curious and romantic chapter than that which deals with ballad
+collecting and collectors. The latter, in Scotland as elsewhere, have
+not been free from the human liability to err--few men have been less
+so. As Percy admitted _Hardyknut_ and other examples of the
+pseudo-antique among his specimens of 'Old Romance Poetry,' Scott's
+critical acumen did not avail to detect brazen forgeries of Surtees,
+like _Barthram's Dirge_ and _The Death of Featherstonhaugh_. In Cromek's
+_Relics of Galloway Song_ were somewhat palpable 'fakements' of Allan
+Cunningham; William Motherwell and Peter Buchan made their egregious
+blunders, and even such careful and experienced antiquaries as Joseph
+Ritson and David Laing slipped on the dark and broken and intricate
+paths which they sought to explore. On the whole it can hardly be
+regretted that our ballad collections bear the impress of the
+idiosyncrasies of the individual ballad-hunters, as well as of the game
+they pursued and the district they coursed over.
+
+Scott made his bag, as he tells us, chiefly 'during his early youth,'
+among 'the shepherds and aged persons in the recesses of the Border
+mountains,' who 'remembered and repeated the warlike songs of their
+fathers.' They were gathered on those long pedestrian excursions, with
+Shortreed or with Leyden (himself a balladist), which were themselves
+often as full of incident, and of the seeds of future romance, as any
+old Border raid. The great Master of Romance was, as one of his
+companions said, 'makin' himsel' a' the time.' Dandie Dinmont, whom the
+author of _Guy Mannering_ sketches from the traits of a dozen honest
+yeomen and store farmers, whose hospitality he had shared in his rambles
+through the wilds of Liddesdale, would a few generations earlier have
+been a stark moss-trooper, ready to ride to the rescue of Kinmont Willie
+or to seek his 'beef and kail' in the Merse. The raid on Habbie Elliot
+of the Heughfoot is but a 'variant' of the lifting of Telfer's kye; and
+_Wandering Willie's Tale_, if it had been cast in verse, would have been
+the pick of our ballads of 'glamourie,' instead of the choicest of short
+prose stories. The rhyme and air that haunted the memory of Henry
+Bertram--what are they but an echo out of Scott's own romantic
+youth--out of the enchanted land of ballad poetry?
+
+    '"Are these the Links of Forth," she said,
+      "Or are they the crooks of Dee,
+    Or the bonnie woods o' Warroch-head
+      That I so fain would see?"'
+
+It was on one of these excursions up Ettrick that Scott forgathered with
+Margaret Laidlaw, the mother of the 'Shepherd,' and the repository of an
+inexhaustible store of fairy tales, songs and ballads, which, as she
+declared, the compiler of the _Border Minstrelsy_ 'spoiled' by
+transmitting to print. But the richest and rarest of his 'finds' was
+Hogg himself. He was nursed in the lap of the Forest and cradled in
+ballad and fairy lore. Here was the 'heart of pathos' of the older
+poetry; the head buzzing with its wild fancies; 'the sang o' the linty
+amang the broom in the spring'; and along with these the shaggy front,
+the strong hand-grips, the loyalty, and the sturdy sense that are the
+far-descended inheritance of the Border farmer and shepherd. Surely, to
+parody his own words, those who love to listen to Allan Ramsay and Burns
+and Scott, and to the nameless Balladists who were their masters and
+teachers, will 'never forget a'thegither the Ettrick Shepherd.'
+
+More important, however, even than the materials gathered by Scott from
+the lips of Mrs. Hogg and other Border ballad reciters, or from the
+Glenriddell MSS., was the golden mine of old poetry, for the
+preservation of which he and the nation were indebted to the taste and
+retentive memory of Mrs. Brown, daughter of Professor Thomas Gordon, of
+King's College, Aberdeen, and wife of a minister of Falkland, in the
+beginning of the century. There are in existence three MSS. of the songs
+and ballads this lady was able to remember as sung to her on Deeside;
+and transcription of her father's account of this precious collection,
+as the story is told by him in a letter to Mr. A. Fraser Tytler, and by
+him communicated to Scott, may best and most authentically explain its
+origin:--
+
+    'An aunt of my children, Mrs. Farquhar, now dead, who was
+    married to the proprietor of a small estate near the sources of
+    the Dee, in Braemar, a good old woman who spent the best part of
+    her life among flocks and herds, resided in her latter days in
+    the town of Aberdeen. She was possessed of a most tenacious
+    memory, which retained all the songs she had heard from nurses
+    and country-women in that sequestered part of the country. Being
+    maternally fond of my children when young, she had them much
+    about her, and delighted them with her songs and tales of
+    chivalry. My youngest daughter, Mrs. Brown, at Falkland, is
+    blessed with a memory as good as her aunt, and has almost the
+    whole of her songs by heart. In conversation, I mentioned them
+    to your father (William Tytler, the champion of Mary Stuart) at
+    whose request my grandson, Mr. Scott, wrote down a parcel of
+    them as her aunt sung them. Being then a mere novice in music,
+    he added, in the copy, such musical notes as, he supposed, would
+    give your father some notion of the airs, or rather lilts, to
+    which they were sung.'
+
+To all those whose names are mentioned in the above extract, Scotland
+and poetry owe a deep debt of gratitude. But here again, although men,
+and men of learning, have borne their part in the salvage, it is to the
+'spindle side,' and to simple country ears and memories, that the main
+acknowledgment is due for saving what it would have been a calamity to
+lose. What may almost be described as the 'classical text' of some of
+the finest of our ballads, is that obtained by collation of the Brown
+'sets,' of which the fullest is that originally owned by Robert
+Jamieson, which reappears in revised form in one of the copies possessed
+by Miss Tytler. From the circumstances of its origin, this text has
+something of a North Country cast, even where it deals with a South
+Country theme. But the three divisions of the land, the North, the
+Centre, and the South, bear a share of the credit of its preservation.
+The ballads were gathered by Deeside; they were sung and recited under
+Lomond Law; they were brought before the world by a Borderer.
+
+No such 'finds' are to be looked for any longer. The ground has been for
+the most part well reaped and gleaned. Only a few ears are to be picked
+up that have escaped the notice of previous collectors; although, within
+the last quarter of a century, in quiet corners like the Enzie and
+Buchan and the Cabrach, the late Dean Christie was still able to gather
+from the lips of old peasant and fisher women specimens both of ballads
+and ballad airs that had never been in print. The chief work for half a
+century has been that of comparing, collating, and critically annotating
+the materials already found, and reference need only be made to the
+monumental work in eight volumes of Professor Child, in which the
+subject of the origins, affinities, variants and genuine text of both
+the Scottish and English ballads has been thoroughly worked out and
+brought nearly down to date.
+
+The Ballads themselves have done a greater work. They have permeated and
+revived the poetry and literature of the century like a draught of rare
+old wine. The greatest of our modern poets have been proud to
+acknowledge what they owe to the forgotten minstrels who have not sent
+down to us out of the darkness, along with their song, so much as their
+name. Wordsworth, as well as Scott, pored entranced over Percy's
+_Reliques_. Coleridge, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, and a host
+besides, have drunk delight and found inspiration in the Scottish ballad
+minstrelsy; and it has awakened a responsive chord in the lyre of the
+poets of America. As enthusiastic old Christopher North wrote, 'Perhaps
+none of us ever wrote verses of any worth who had not been more or less
+readers of our old ballads.'
+
+    'The Bards are lost,
+    The song is saved.'
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Balladists, by John Geddie
+
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