LADY WARDLAW AND THE BARONESS NAIRNE[6]

In 1719 there was published in Edinburgh, in a tract of twelve folio pages, a small poem, 27 stanzas or 216 lines long, entitledHardyknute, a Fragment. It was printed in old spelling, to look like a piece of old Scottish poetry that had somehow been recovered; and it seems to have been accepted as such by those into whose hands the copy had come, and who were concerned in having it published. Among these were Duncan Forbes of Culloden, afterwards Lord President of the Court of Session, and Sir Gilbert Elliott of Minto, afterwards Lord Justice-Clerk; but there is something like proof that it had come into their hands indirectly from Sir John Hope Bruce of Kinross, baronet, who died as late as 1766 at a great age, in the rank of lieutenant-general, and who, some time before 1719, had sent a manuscript copy of it to Lord Binning, with a fantastic story to the effect that the original, in a much defaced vellum, had been found, a few weeks before, in a vault at Dunfermline.

The little thing, having become popular in its first published form, was reproduced in 1724 by Allan Ramsay in hisEvergreen, which professed to be “a collection of Scots Poems wrote by the ingeniousbefore 1600”; but it there appeared with corrections and some additional stanzas. In 1740 it had the honour of a new appearance in London, under anonymous editorship, and with the title “Hardyknute, a Fragment; being the first Canto of an Epick Poem: with general remarks and notes.” The anonymous editor, still treating it as a genuine old poem, of not later than the sixteenth century, praises it very highly. “There is a grandeur, a majesty of sentiment,” he says, “diffused through the whole: a true sublime, which nothing can surpass.” It was but natural that a piece of which this could be said should be included by Percy in hisReliques of Ancient English Poetry, published in 1765. It appeared, accordingly, in the first edition of that famous book, still as an old poem and in antique spelling; and it was reprinted in the subsequent editions issued by Percy himself in 1767, 1775, and 1794, though then with some added explanations and queries.

It was through Percy’s collection that the poem first became generally known and popular. Even there, though in very rich company, it was singled out by competent critics for special admiration. But, indeed, good judges, who had known it in its earlier forms, had already made it a favourite. The poet Gray admired it much; and Thomas Warton spoke of it as “a noble poem,” and introduced an enthusiastic reference to it into one of his odes. Above all, it is celebrated now as having fired the boyish genius of Sir Walter Scott. “I was taughtHardyknuteby heart before I could read the ballad myself,” he tells us, informing us further that the book out of which he was taught the ballad was Allan Ramsay’sEvergreenof 1724, and adding, “It was the first poem I everlearnt, the last I shall ever forget.” In another place he tells us more particularly that it was taught him out of the book by one of his aunts during that visit to his grandfather’s farmhouse of Sandyknowe in Roxburghshire on which he had been sent when only in his third year for country air and exercise on account of his delicate health and lameness, and which he remembered always as the source of his earliest impressions and the time of his first consciousness of existence. He was accustomed to go about the farmhouse shouting out the verses of the ballad incessantly, so that the Rev. Dr. Duncan, the minister of the parish, in his calls for a sober chat with the elder inmates, would complain of the interruption and say, “One may as well speak in the mouth of a cannon as where that child is.”Hardyknute, we may then say, was the first thing in literature that took hold of the soul and imagination of Scott; and who knows how far it may have helped to determine the cast and direction of his own genius through all the future? Afterwards, through his life in Edinburgh, Ashestiel, and Abbotsford, he was never tired of repeating snatches of the strong old thing he had learnt at Sandyknowe; and the very year before his death (1831) we find him, when abroad at Malta in the vain hope of recruiting his shattered frame, lamenting greatly, in a conversation about ballad-poetry, that he had not been able to persuade his friend Mr. John Hookham Frere to think so highly of the merits ofHardyknuteas he did himself.

Whatisthe piece of verse so celebrated? It must be familiar to many; but we may look at it again. We shall take it in its later or more complete form, as consisting of 42 stanzas or 336 lines; in which form, though it is still only a fragment, the conception orstory is somewhat more complex, more filled out, than in the first published form of 1719. The fragment opens thus:—

“Stately stept he east the wa’,And stately stept he west;Full seventy years he now had seen,With scarce seven years of rest.He lived when Britons’ breach of faithWrocht Scotland mickle wae;And aye his sword tauld, to their cost,He was their deadly fae.High on a hill his castle stood,With halls and towers a-hicht,And guidly chambers fair to see,Whare he lodged mony a knicht.His dame, sae peerless ance and fair,For chaste and beauty deemed,Nae marrow had in a’ the land,Save Eleanour the Queen.Full thirteen sons to him she bare,All men of valour stout;In bluidy fecht with sword in handNine lost their lives bot doubt:Four yet remain; lang may they liveTo stand by liege and land!High was their fame, high was their micht,And high was their command.Great love they bare to Fairly fair,Their sister saft and dear:Her girdle shawed her middle jimp,And gowden glist her hair.What waefu’ wae her beauty bred,Waefu’ to young and auld;Waefu’, I trow, to kith and kin,As story ever tauld!”

“Stately stept he east the wa’,

And stately stept he west;

Full seventy years he now had seen,

With scarce seven years of rest.

He lived when Britons’ breach of faith

Wrocht Scotland mickle wae;

And aye his sword tauld, to their cost,

He was their deadly fae.

High on a hill his castle stood,With halls and towers a-hicht,And guidly chambers fair to see,Whare he lodged mony a knicht.His dame, sae peerless ance and fair,For chaste and beauty deemed,Nae marrow had in a’ the land,Save Eleanour the Queen.

High on a hill his castle stood,

With halls and towers a-hicht,

And guidly chambers fair to see,

Whare he lodged mony a knicht.

His dame, sae peerless ance and fair,

For chaste and beauty deemed,

Nae marrow had in a’ the land,

Save Eleanour the Queen.

Full thirteen sons to him she bare,All men of valour stout;In bluidy fecht with sword in handNine lost their lives bot doubt:Four yet remain; lang may they liveTo stand by liege and land!High was their fame, high was their micht,And high was their command.

Full thirteen sons to him she bare,

All men of valour stout;

In bluidy fecht with sword in hand

Nine lost their lives bot doubt:

Four yet remain; lang may they live

To stand by liege and land!

High was their fame, high was their micht,

And high was their command.

Great love they bare to Fairly fair,Their sister saft and dear:Her girdle shawed her middle jimp,And gowden glist her hair.What waefu’ wae her beauty bred,Waefu’ to young and auld;Waefu’, I trow, to kith and kin,As story ever tauld!”

Great love they bare to Fairly fair,

Their sister saft and dear:

Her girdle shawed her middle jimp,

And gowden glist her hair.

What waefu’ wae her beauty bred,

Waefu’ to young and auld;

Waefu’, I trow, to kith and kin,

As story ever tauld!”

Here we see the old hero Hardyknute in peace in the midst of his family, his fighting days supposed to be over, and his high castle on the hill, where he and his lady dwell, with their four surviving sons and their one daughter, Fairly Fair, one of the lordly boasts ofa smiling country. But suddenly there is an invasion. The King of Norse, puffed up with power and might, lands in fair Scotland; and the King of Scotland, hearing the tidings as he sits with his chiefs, “drinking the blude-red wine,” sends out summonses in haste for all his warriors to join him. Hardyknute receives a special message.

“Then red, red grew his dark-brown cheeks;Sae did his dark-brown brow;His looks grew keen, as they were wontIn dangers great to do.”

“Then red, red grew his dark-brown cheeks;

Sae did his dark-brown brow;

His looks grew keen, as they were wont

In dangers great to do.”

Old as he is, he will set out at once, taking his three eldest sons with him, Robin, Thomas, and Malcolm, and telling his lady in his farewell to her:—

“My youngest son sall here remainTo guaird these stately towers,And shoot the silver bolt that keepsSae fast your painted bowers.”

“My youngest son sall here remain

To guaird these stately towers,

And shoot the silver bolt that keeps

Sae fast your painted bowers.”

And so we take leave of the high castle on the hill, with the lady, her youngest son, and Fairly fair, in it, and follow the old lord and his other three sons over the moors and through the glens as they ride to the rendezvous. On their way they encounter a wounded knight, lying on the ground and making a heavy moan:—

“‘Here maun I lie, here maun I die,By treachery’s false guiles;Witless I was that e’er gave faithTo wicked woman’s smiles.’”

“‘Here maun I lie, here maun I die,

By treachery’s false guiles;

Witless I was that e’er gave faith

To wicked woman’s smiles.’”

Hardyknute, stopping, comforts him; says that, if he can but mount his steed and manage to get to his castle on the hill, he will be tended there by his lady and Fairly fair herself; and offers to detach some of his men with him for convoy.

“With smileless look and visage wanThe wounded knicht replied:‘Kind chieftain, your intent pursue,For here I maun abide.‘To me nae after day nor nichtCan e’er be sweet or fair;But soon, beneath some drapping tree,Cauld death sail end my care.’”

“With smileless look and visage wanThe wounded knicht replied:‘Kind chieftain, your intent pursue,For here I maun abide.

“With smileless look and visage wan

The wounded knicht replied:

‘Kind chieftain, your intent pursue,

For here I maun abide.

‘To me nae after day nor nichtCan e’er be sweet or fair;But soon, beneath some drapping tree,Cauld death sail end my care.’”

‘To me nae after day nor nicht

Can e’er be sweet or fair;

But soon, beneath some drapping tree,

Cauld death sail end my care.’”

Farther pleading by Hardyknute avails nothing; and, as time presses, he has to depart, leaving the wounded knight, so far as we can see, on the ground as he had found him, still making his moan. Then, after farther riding over a great region, called vaguely Lord Chattan’s land, we have the arrival of Hardyknute and his three sons in the King of Scotland’s camp, minstrels marching before them playing pibrochs. Hardly have they been welcomed when the battle with the Norse King and his host is begun. It is described at considerable length, and with much power, though confusedly, so that one hardly knows who is speaking or who is wounded amid the whirr of arrows, the shouting, and the clash of armour. One sees, however, Hardyknute and two of his sons fighting grandly in the pell-mell. At last it is all over, and we know that the Norse King and his host have been routed, and that Scotland has been saved.

“In thraws of death, with wallert cheek,All panting on the plain,The fainting corps of warriors lay,Ne’er to arise again:Ne’er to return to native land;Nae mair wi’ blythesome soundsTo boist the glories of the dayAnd shaw their shinand wounds.On Norway’s coast the widowed dameMay wash the rock with tears,May lang look ower the shipless seas,Before her mate appears.Cease, Emma, cease to hope in vain:Thy lord lies in the clay;The valiant Scats nae reivers tholeTo carry life away.There, on a lea where stands a crossSet up for monument,Thousands full fierce, that summer’s day,Filled keen war’s black intent.Let Scots, while Scots, praise Hardyknute;Let Norse the name aye dread;Aye how he foucht, aft how he spared,Sall latest ages read.”

“In thraws of death, with wallert cheek,

All panting on the plain,

The fainting corps of warriors lay,

Ne’er to arise again:

Ne’er to return to native land;

Nae mair wi’ blythesome sounds

To boist the glories of the day

And shaw their shinand wounds.

On Norway’s coast the widowed dameMay wash the rock with tears,May lang look ower the shipless seas,Before her mate appears.Cease, Emma, cease to hope in vain:Thy lord lies in the clay;The valiant Scats nae reivers tholeTo carry life away.

On Norway’s coast the widowed dame

May wash the rock with tears,

May lang look ower the shipless seas,

Before her mate appears.

Cease, Emma, cease to hope in vain:

Thy lord lies in the clay;

The valiant Scats nae reivers thole

To carry life away.

There, on a lea where stands a crossSet up for monument,Thousands full fierce, that summer’s day,Filled keen war’s black intent.Let Scots, while Scots, praise Hardyknute;Let Norse the name aye dread;Aye how he foucht, aft how he spared,Sall latest ages read.”

There, on a lea where stands a cross

Set up for monument,

Thousands full fierce, that summer’s day,

Filled keen war’s black intent.

Let Scots, while Scots, praise Hardyknute;

Let Norse the name aye dread;

Aye how he foucht, aft how he spared,

Sall latest ages read.”

Here the story might seem to end, and here perhaps it was intended at first that it should end; but in the completer copies there are three more stanzas, taking us back to Hardyknute’s castle on the high hill. We are to fancy Hardyknute and his sons returning joyfully thither after the great victory:—

“Loud and chill blew the westlin wind,Sair beat the heavy shower;Mirk grew the nicht ere HardyknuteWan near his stately tower:His tower, that used with torches’ bleezeTo shine sae far at nicht,Seemed now as black as mourning weed:Nae marvel sair he sich’d.‘There’s nae licht in my lady’s bower;There’s nae licht in my hall;Nae blink shines round my Fairly fair,Nor ward stands on my wall.What bodes it? Robert, Thomas, say!’Nae answer fits their dread.‘Stand back, my sons! I’ll be your guide!’But by they passed wi’ speed.‘As fast I have sped ower Scotland’s faes.’There ceased his brag of weir,Sair shamed to mind oucht but his dameAnd maiden Fairly fair.Black fear he felt, but what to fearHe wist not yet with dread:Sair shook his body, sair his limbs;And all the warrior fled.”

“Loud and chill blew the westlin wind,

Sair beat the heavy shower;

Mirk grew the nicht ere Hardyknute

Wan near his stately tower:

His tower, that used with torches’ bleeze

To shine sae far at nicht,

Seemed now as black as mourning weed:

Nae marvel sair he sich’d.

‘There’s nae licht in my lady’s bower;There’s nae licht in my hall;Nae blink shines round my Fairly fair,Nor ward stands on my wall.What bodes it? Robert, Thomas, say!’Nae answer fits their dread.‘Stand back, my sons! I’ll be your guide!’But by they passed wi’ speed.

‘There’s nae licht in my lady’s bower;

There’s nae licht in my hall;

Nae blink shines round my Fairly fair,

Nor ward stands on my wall.

What bodes it? Robert, Thomas, say!’

Nae answer fits their dread.

‘Stand back, my sons! I’ll be your guide!’

But by they passed wi’ speed.

‘As fast I have sped ower Scotland’s faes.’There ceased his brag of weir,Sair shamed to mind oucht but his dameAnd maiden Fairly fair.Black fear he felt, but what to fearHe wist not yet with dread:Sair shook his body, sair his limbs;And all the warrior fled.”

‘As fast I have sped ower Scotland’s faes.’

There ceased his brag of weir,

Sair shamed to mind oucht but his dame

And maiden Fairly fair.

Black fear he felt, but what to fear

He wist not yet with dread:

Sair shook his body, sair his limbs;

And all the warrior fled.”

And so the fragment really ends, making us aware of some dreadful catastrophe, though what it is we know not. Something ghastly has happened in the castle during Hardyknute’s absence, but it is left untold. Only, by a kind of necessity of the imagination, we connect it somehow with that wounded knight whom Hardyknute had met lying on the ground as he was hurrying to the war, and whom he had left making his moan. Was he a fiend, or what?

It is quite useless to call this a historical ballad. There was a reference, perhaps, in the author’s mind, to the battle of Largs in Ayrshire, fought by the Scots in 1263, in the reign of Alexander III., against the invading King Haco of Norway; and there is a Fairly Castle on a hill near Largs which may have yielded a suggestion and a name. But, in truth, any old Scottish reign, and any Norse invasion, will do for time and basis, and the ballad is essentially of the romantic kind, a story snatched from an ideal antique, and appealing to the pure poetic imagination. A battle is flung in; but what rivets our interest is the hero Hardyknute, a Scottish warrior with a Danish name, and that stately castle of his, somewhere on the top of a hill, in which he dwelt so splendidly with his lady, his four sons, and their sister Fairly fair, till he was called once more to war, and in which there was some ghastly desolation before his return. Such as it is, we shall all agree, I think, with Gray, Warton, Scott, and the rest of the best critics, inadmiring the fragment. It has that something in it which we callgenius.

It seems strange now that any critic could ever have taken the ballad for a really old one, to be dated from the sixteenth century or earlier. Apart from the trick of old spelling, and affectation of the antique in a word or two, the phraseology, the manner, the cadence, the style of the Scotch employed, are all of about the date of the first publication of the ballad, the first quarter of the eighteenth century. The phrase “Let Scots, while Scots, praise Hardyknute,” and the phrase “And all the warrior fled,” are decisive; and, while there might be room for the supposition that some old legend suggested the subject to the author, the general cast of the whole forbids the idea that it is merely a version of some transmitted original.

Suspicions, indeed, of the modern authorship ofHardyknutehad arisen in various quarters long before any one person in particular was publicly named as the author. That was first done by Percy in 1767, in the second edition of hisReliques, when he gave his reasons for thinking, from information transmitted to him from Scotland by Sir David Dalrymple, Lord Hailes, that the ballad was substantially the composition of a Scottish lady, who had died in 1727, eight years after it had first appeared in its less perfect form, and three years after it had appeared with the improvements and the additional stanzas. That lady was Elizabeth Halket, born in 1677, one of the daughters of Sir Charles Halket of Pitfirran in Fifeshire, baronet, but who had changed her name to Wardlaw in the year 1696, when she became the wife of Sir Henry Wardlaw of Pitreavie, also a Fifeshire baronet. All subsequent evidence hasconfirmed the belief that this Lady Wardlaw was the real author ofHardyknute, though, to mystify people, it was first given out by her relatives as an ancient fragment. This was the statement more especially of the already-mentioned Sir John Hope Bruce of Kinross, who was one of her brothers-in-law.

Of Lady Wardlaw herself we hear nothing more distinct than that she was “a woman of elegant accomplishments, who wrote other poems, and practised drawing and cutting paper with her scissors, and who had much wit and humour, with great sweetness of temper.” So we must be content to imagine her,—a bright-minded and graceful lady, living in Fifeshire, or coming and going between Fifeshire and Edinburgh, nearly two centuries ago, and who, while attending to her family duties and the duties of her station, could cherish in secret a poetic vein peculiarly her own, and produce at least one fine ballad of an ideal Scottish antique. This in itself would be much. For that was the age of Queen Anne and of the first of the Georges, when poetry of an ideal or romantic kind was perhaps at its lowest ebb throughout the British Islands, and the poetry most in repute was that of the modern school of artificial wit and polish represented by Addison and Pope.

But this is not all. In the year 1859 the late Mr. Robert Chambers published a very ingenious and interesting essay entitled “The Romantic Scottish Ballads: their Epoch and Authorship.” The ballads to which he invited critical attention were the particular group which includesSir Patrick Spens,Gil Morrice,Edward Edward,The Jew’s Daughter,Gilderoy,Young Waters,Edom o’ Gordon,Johnnie of Braidislee,Mary Hamilton,The Gay Goss Hawk,Fause Foodrage,The Lass of Lochryan,Young Huntin,The Douglas Tragedy,Clerk Saunders,Sweet William’s Ghost, and several others. With but one or two exceptions, these were first given to the world either in Percy’sReliquesin 1765, or in the subsequent collections of Herd (1769), Scott (1802), and Jamieson (1806); but, since they were published, they have been favourites with all lovers of true poetry,—the “grand ballad” ofSir Patrick Spens, as Coleridge called it, ranking perhaps highest, on the whole, in general opinion. There is a certain common character in all the ballads of the group, a character of genuine ideality, of unconnectedness or but hazy connectedness with particular time or place, of a tendency to the weirdly, and also of a high-bred elegance and lightsome tact of expression, distinguishing them from the properly historical Scottish Ballads, such as theBattle of Otterbourne, or the Border Ballads proper, such asKinmont Willie, or the homely rustic ballads of local or family incident of which so many have been collected. Hence the distinctive name of “romantic,” usually applied to them.

Respecting these ballads the common theory was, and still is, that they are very old indeed,—that they are the transmitted oral versions of ballads that were in circulation among the Scottish people before the Reformation. This theory Mr. Chambers challenged, and by a great variety of arguments. Not only was it very suspicious, he said, that there were no ancient manuscripts of them, and that, save in one or two cases, they had never been heard of till the eighteenth century; but the internal evidence, of conception, sentiment, costume, and phraseology,—not in lines and passages merely, where change from an originalmight be supposed, but through and through, and back to the very core of any supposed original,—all pointed, he maintained, to a date of composition not farther back than the beginning of the century in which they first came into print. He maintained farther that they all reveal the hand of some person of superior breeding and refinement, with a cultivated literary expertness and sense of the exquisite, and that, just as the difference of age would be seen if one of them were placed side by side with an authentic piece of old Scottish poetry of the sixteenth century, so would this other difference of refined or cultured execution be at once seen if one of them were placed side by side with a genuine popular ballad of lowly origin, such as used to please in sheets on street-stalls and in pedlars’ chap-books. Farther still, in all or most of the ballads concerned, there are, he argued, traces of feminine perception and feeling. And so, still pressing the question, and noting the recurrence of phrases and ideas from ballad to ballad of the group, not to be found in other ballads, but looking like the acquired devices of one and the same writer’s fancy,—some of the most remarkable of which recurring ideas and phrases he chased up to the ballad ofHardyknute,—he arrived at the conclusion that there was a “great likelihood” that all or most of the ballads he was considering were either absolutely the inventions of Lady Wardlaw of Pitreavie, or such complete recasts by her of traditional fragments that she might be called the real author. He would not advance the conclusion as more than a “great likelihood,” and he allowed that it might be still controverted; but he cited in its favour the fact that so high an authority as Mr. David Laing had previously intimated his impression thatHardyknuteandSir Patrick Spenswere by the same hand.

Were Mr. Chambers’s conclusion to be verified, it would be a sore wrench to the patriotic prejudices of many to have to abandon the long-cherished fancy of the immemorial, or at least remote, antiquity of so many fine Scottish favourites. But what a compensation! For then that Lady Wardlaw whom we can already station, for herHardyknutealone, as undoubtedly one woman of genius in the poverty-stricken Scotland of the beginning of the eighteenth century, would shine out with greatly increased radiance as the author of a whole cycle of the finest ballad-pieces in our language, a figure of very high importance in Scottish literary history, a precursor or sister of Burns and of Scott. For my own part, I would willingly submit to the wrench for a compensation so splendid. I am bound to report, however, that Mr. Chambers’s speculation of 1859 was controverted strenuously at the time, has been pronounced a heresy, and does not seem to have been anywhere generally accepted. It was controverted especially, within a year from its appearance, in a pamphlet of reply by Mr. Norval Clyne of Aberdeen, entitled “The Scottish Romantic Ballads and the Lady Wardlaw Heresy”; and I observe that Professor Child of America, in his great Collection of English and Scottish Ballads, pays no respect to it, treats it as exploded by Mr. Clyne’s reply, and expressly dissociatesSir Patrick Spensand other ballads of the class fromHardyknute. It may be enough, in these circumstances, merely to intimate my opinion that the controversy is by no means closed. There were shrewder and deeper suggestions, I think, in Mr. Chambers’s paper of 1859 than Mr.Clyne was able to obviate; and, having observed that most of the lore on the subject used by Mr. Clyne in his reply, his adverse references and quotations included, was derived from Mr. Chambers’s own Introduction and Notes to his three-volume edition of Scottish Songs and Ballads in 1829, I cannot but presume that Mr. Chambers had all that lore sufficiently in his mind thirty years afterwards, and found nothing in it to impede or disconcert him then in his new speculation. Apart, however, from the special question of Lady Wardlaw’s concern in the matter, Mr. Chambers seems to me to have moved a very proper and necessary inquiry when he started his theory of the comparatively recent origin of all or most of the Scottish Romantic Ballads. In what conception, what kind of language, does the opposite theory couch itself? In the conception that, besides the series of those literary products of past Scottish generations, the work of learned or professional writers, from the time of Barbour onwards, that have come down to us in books, or in old manuscript collections like that of Bannatyne, there was always a distinct literature of more lowly origin, consisting of ballads and songs recited or sung in Scottish households in various districts, and orally transmitted from age to age with no names attached to them, and indeed requiring none, inasmuch as they were nobody’s property in particular, but had “sprung from the heart of the people.” Now, this phrase, “sprung from the heart of the people,” I submit, is, if not nonsensical, at least hazy and misleading. Nothing of fine literary quality ever came into existence, in any time or place, except as the product of some individual person of genius and of somewhat more than average culture. Instead of saying that such things “springfrom the heart of the people,” one ought rather to say therefore that they “springtothe heart of the people.” They live after their authors are forgotten, are repeated with local modifications, and so become common property. It is, of course, not denied that this process must have been at work in Scotland through many centuries before the eighteenth. The proof exists in scraps of fine old Scottish song still preserved, the earliest perhaps the famous verse on the death of Alexander III., and in lists, such as that inThe Complaint of Scotland, of the titles of clusters of old Scottish songs and tales that were popular throughout the country in the sixteenth century, but have perished since. The very contention of Mr. Chambers respectingSir Patrick Spensand the other ballads in question was that the fact that there is no mention of them in those old lists is itself significant, and that they have a set of special characteristics which came into fashion only with themselves.

If Lady Wardlawwasthe author of those ballads, or of some of them, we have lost much by her secretiveness. We have been put in a perplexity where perplexity there ought to have been none. The cause, on her part, was perhaps less a desire for mystification than an amiable shrinking from publicity, dislike of being talked of as a literary lady. This was a feeling which the ungenerous mankind of the last century,—husbands, brothers, uncles, and brothers-in-law,—thought it proper to foster in any feminine person of whose literary accomplishments they were privately proud. It affected the careers of not a few later Scottish women of genius in the same century, and even through part of our own. Passing over several such, and among them Lady AnneBarnard, the authoress ofAuld Robin Gray, let me come to an instance so recent that it can be touched by the memories of many that are still living.

In the year 1766, seven years after the birth of Burns, and five before that of Scott, there was born, in the old house of Gask in Strathearn, Perthshire, a certain Carolina Oliphant, the third child of Laurence Oliphant the younger, who, by the death of his father the next year, became the Laird of Gask and the representative of the old family of the Oliphants.

They were a Jacobite family to the core. The Laird and his father had been out in the Rebellion of 1745; they had suffered much in consequence and been long in exile; and not till a year or two before the birth of this little girl had they been permitted to return and settle on their shattered estates. They were true to their Jacobitism even then, acknowledging no King but the one “over the water,” praying for him, corresponding with him, and keeping up the recollection of him in their household as almost a religion. Carolina was named Carolina because, had she been a boy, she was to have been named Charles, and she used to say that her parents had never forgiven her for having been born a girl. But two boys were born at last, and there were sisters both older and younger; and so, among Oliphants, and Robertsons of Struan, and Murrays, and other relatives, all Jacobite, and all of the Scottish Episcopal persuasion, Carolina grew up in the old house of Gask, hearing Jacobite stories and Highland legends from her infancy, and educated with some care. The mother having died when this,her third, child was but eight years of age, the Laird was left with six young ones. “A poor valetudinary person,” as he describes himself, he seems, however, to have been a man of fine character and accomplishments, and to have taken great pains with his children. King George III., hearing somehow of his unswerving Jacobitism and the whimsicalities in which it showed itself, is said to have sent him this message by the member for Perthshire: “Give my compliments, not the compliments of the King of England, but those of the Elector of Hanover, to Mr. Oliphant, and tell him how much I respect him for the steadiness of his principles.”

Somewhat stately and melancholic himself, and keeping up the ceremonious distance between him and his children then thought proper, the Laird of Gask had those liberal and anti-morose views of education which belonged especially to Scottish nonjuring or Episcopalian families. A wide range of reading was permitted to the boys and the girls; dancing, especially reel-dancing, was incessant among them,—at home, in the houses of neighbouring lairds, or at county-balls; in music, especially in Scottish song, they were all expert, so that the rumour of a coming visit of Neil Gow and his violin to Strathearn, with the prospect it brought them of a week extraordinary of combined music and reel-dancing, would set them all madly astir; but the most musical of the family by far was Carolina. She lived in music, in mirth, legend, Highland scenery, and the dance, a beautiful girl to boot, and called “the Flower of Strathearn,” of tall and graceful mien, with fine eyes, and fine sensitive features, slightly proud and aquiline. And so to 1792, when her father, the valetudinary laird,died, some of his children already out in the world, but this one, at the age of twenty-six, still unmarried.

For fourteen years more we hear of her as still living in the old house of Gask with her brother Laurence, the new Laird, and with the wife he brought into it in 1795,—the even tenor of her existence broken only by some such incident as a visit to the north of England. During this time it is that we become aware also of the beginnings in her mind of a deep new seriousness, a pious devoutness, which, without interfering with her passionate fondness for song and music, or her liking for mirth and humour and every form of art, continued to be thenceforth the dominant feeling of her life, bringing her into closer and closer affinity with the “fervid” or “evangelical” in religion in whatever denomination it appeared. All this while, or for the greater part of it, there was an engagement between her and a half-cousin of hers, Captain Nairne. He was of Irish birth, but of the Scottish family of the Perthshire Nairnes, and heir, after his elder brother’s death, to the Nairne peerage, should that peerage, which had been attainted after the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715, be ever revived. Of that there seemed no hope, and Captain Nairne’s fortunes and prospects were of the poorest. Not till the year 1806, therefore, when he was promoted to the brevet rank of Major, and obtained the appointment of Assistant-Inspector-General of Barracks in Scotland, were the betrothed cousins able to marry, she then in her fortieth year, and he nine years older.

Their married life of four-and-twenty years was spent almost wholly in Edinburgh. Residing first in a cottage in one of the suburbs of the town, they were known for a good while there as a gentleman andlady of slender means, but distinguished family connections, having an only son, of delicate constitution, whom they were educating privately, and on whose account they lived in a rather retired manner, cultivating a few select friendships, but not going much into general society. Ravelston House, at the foot of the Corstorphine Hills, of which Mrs. Nairne’s younger sister became mistress in 1811 by her marriage with the then Keith of Ravelston, was one of the few places in which Mrs. Nairne and her husband were regularly to be seen at parties. Though this and occasional meetings elsewhere must have brought her into talking acquaintance with Scott,—in whose life Ravelston House was so dear and familiar that it became the suggestion of his castle of Tullyveolan inWaverley,—there is no evidence of any intimacy between the two; nor does Mrs. Nairne’s name once occur, I think, in Lockhart’sLife of Scott, full though that book is of allusions to persons and things memorable in Edinburgh while the great wizard was its most illustrious inhabitant. One of the many kindly acts of Scott’s life, however, had some influence on the fortunes of Mrs. Nairne. During the visit of George IV. to Edinburgh in 1822, Scott took occasion to suggest to him that the restoration of the attainted Jacobite families to their titles would be a graceful and popular act of his reign, and the consequence was a Bill for the purpose which passed Parliament and received the royal assent in 1824. Thus, at the age of sixty-seven, Major Nairne became Baron Nairne of Nairne in Perthshire, and his wife, at the age of eight-and-fifty, Baroness Nairne. It seems to have been about this date, or shortly afterwards, though I am not quite sure, that they had a temporary residence in HolyroodPalace. At all events, I have been informed that at one time they had apartments there.

In 1830, six years after the recovery of his title, Lord Nairne died. This broke Lady Nairne’s domiciliary tie to Edinburgh. She removed first to the south of England, to be with some of her relatives; thence to Ireland, where she lived a year or two; and thence in 1834 to the Continent, on account of the ill-health of her son, the new Lord Nairne, then a young man of six-and-twenty. For the next three years, she, her son, and her widowed sister Mrs. Keith, moved about, through France, Switzerland, Italy, and Germany, mainly for the recreation and recruiting of the sickly young Lord, who, however, died at Brussels in December 1837, in his thirtieth year, and was there buried.

The widowed Baroness, thus childless and lonely in the world, continued to live abroad for a year or two longer, chiefly in Germany and in Paris. Her consolations in her bereavement were in correspondence with her nephews and nieces at home, in readings in religious and other good books, in her interest in Christian missions and other movements of Protestant Evangelism, and in secret acts of charity in aid of such missions and movements, or in relief of private distresses. A foreign waiting-maid, who was long in her service abroad, described her afterwards in these words: “My lady was as near to an angel as human weakness might permit.” But she was not to die abroad. In the year 1843, just after the Disruption of the Scottish Church,—in which event, though she remained a loyal Scottish Episcopalian as before, her interest was remarkably deep,—she was persuaded to return to Scotland and take upher residence once more at Gask: not now in the old house in which she had been born, but in the new mansion that had been built by her nephew, James Blair Oliphant, then Laird of Gask. Here she lived two years more, in the serene piety of a beautiful old age, and in deeds, every week or every day, of benevolence and mercy. She was able to visit Edinburgh once or twice; and it was there, in the year 1844, that she consulted Dr. Chalmers, whom she admired greatly and with whom she had already been in correspondence, as to fit objects for such charitable donations as her thrift enabled her to spare. She gave him, besides other smaller sums, the £300 which enabled him to accomplish the object he had then most at heart by acquiring a site for the schools and church he had resolved to plant, and did plant, amid what he called the “heathenism” of the West Port, in the very labyrinth of closes in that rank neighbourhood which had been made hideous by the Burke and Hare murders of 1828. Dr. Chalmers alone knew of the gift; no one else. A few months more of invalid existence at Gask House, with failing memory, and somewhat paralytic, and the saintly lady’s life was over. She died October 27, 1845, in the house of Gask, at the age of seventy-nine. Her remains rest in a chapel near that house, erected for Episcopal service on the site of the old parish church, in the midst of the scenery of her native Strathearn, which she loved in life so well.

That this woman had ever written a line of verse was a secret which she all but carried to the grave with her. And yet for fifty years, no less, people all round her had been singing her songs and talking about them with admiration, and phrases from them hadbecome household words throughout Scotland, and some of them were universally spoken of as the finest Scottish songs, the songs of keenest and deepest genius, since those of Burns.

At how early a period in her life she, who could sing songs so well and who knew so many, may have tried to write one, we cannot tell; but it was in or about the year 1793, when Burns was in the full flush of his fame, and his exertions for improving and reforming Scottish Song by providing new words for old airs had kindled her enthusiasm, that she penned her first known lyric. It was calledThe Pleughman, and was written to be sung by her brother at a dinner of the Gask tenantry. Having been successful in that form, it was afterwards circulated by him, but with every precaution for keeping it anonymous. Had Burns lived a year longer than he did, he might have heard not only of thisPleughman, but also of another song from the same unknown hand that would have touched him a thousand times more, as it has touched all the world since,—The Land o’ the Leal.That song was written, it is believed, by Carolina Oliphant in 1797, when she was in her thirty-second year. Had the fact been known, how she would have been honoured and pointed at everywhere, all her life after, wherever she went! But the secret was kept;The Land o’ the Lealcame to be attributed to Burns, and was printed at last in editions of Burns as indubitably his; and the true authoress came into Edinburgh, to live in that city, close to Scott, for four-and-twenty years; and through all that timehe, who would have limped across the room with beaming eyes to single her out in chief had he been aware of the reality, remained ignorant that the handsome, but no longer young, lady whomhe sometimes met at Ravelston had any other distinction than that of being the sister-in-law of Sandy Keith, and the wife of Major Nairne, Assistant-Inspector-General of Barracks. Yet this very time of her residence in Edinburgh as Mrs. Nairne was the time also, it appears, of the production of not a few additional songs of hers, some of them nearly as popular, with all or most of which Scott must have been familiar. Here particularly it was that in 1821, as we learn from the slight memoirs of her now extant, she, in concert with a small committee of other Edinburgh ladies, all sworn to secrecy, became a contributor, under the name of “Mrs. Bogan of Bogan” or under otheraliases, to a collection of national airs, calledThe Scottish Minstrel, brought out in parts by Mr. Robert Purdie, a music-publisher of the city. She continued to contribute; and the work was completed in six volumes in 1824, the year in which she became Baroness Nairne. Mr. Purdie himself never knew who this valuable contributor to his collection was, nor did any one else out of the circle of her most intimate lady-friends. Her own husband, Lord Nairne, I am credibly informed, remained ignorant to his dying day that his wife had been guilty of song-writing or of any other kind of literary performance. Nor was silence broken on the subject through the subsequent fifteen years of Lady Nairne’s widowhood. Away in England, Ireland, or abroad, through thirteen of those years, she would still pen a little Scottish lilt occasionally, when some feeling moved her; and so till, returning to Scotland in her old age, with no one knows what memories of private sadness under her semi-aristocratic reticence and her gentle Christian faith, she lingered out her last year or two, and then died.Her secretiveness as to the authorship of the songs that might have made her famous when living was preserved to the last. Just before her death shehadconsented that a collective edition of them should be published, but without her name. Two months after her death, when Dr. Chalmers thought himself absolved from his promise of secrecy as to the name of the donor of the £300 for his church and schools in the West Port, he announced at a public meeting that the donor, then in her grave, had been “Lady Nairne, of Perthshire.” Even he cannot have then known of any other title of hers to regard; for, if he had, and if I know Dr. Chalmers, he would have added, with all the emotion of his great heart, “authoress ofThe Land o’ the Leal.” It occurs to me sometimes that in that very year 1844, when this Scottishwoman of genius was on her last visit to Edinburgh, and in occasional conferences with Dr. Chalmers in his house in Morningside, I might myself have seen her in his company or neighbourhood. But, with the rest of the world, I knew nothing then of her literary claims; and, when I read or heardThe Land o’ the Leal, I thought the words were by Burns.

Only since 1846, the year after Lady Nairne’s death, can she be said to have taken her place by name in the literature of her country. In that year, her surviving sister Mrs. Keith thinking there could be nothing wrong now in letting the truth be known, there appeared the projected collective edition of the songs in the form of a thin folio, with this title-page: “Lays from Strathearn, by Caroline, Baroness Nairne, Author of ‘The Land o’ the Leal,’ etc.: Arranged, with Symphonies and Accompaniments, for the Pianoforte, by Finlay Dun.” In a subsequent edition severalpieces that had been omitted in this one were added; and now perhaps the most complete collection of the songs is that edited by Dr. Charles Rogers in 1869 in a small volume containing the words without the music, and having a memoir prefixed. The number of pieces there printed as Lady Nairne’s is ninety-eight in all.

What strikes one first on looking at the ninety-eight is the variety of their moods and subjects, the versatility of mind they exhibit. There are Jacobite songs; and, what is remarkable in one brought up in Jacobite sentiments and traditions, there are songs of sympathy with Knox, the Covenanters, and the old Scottish Presbyterians and Whigs, the very contradictories of Scottish Jacobitism. Then there are lovesongs, satirical songs, humorous songs and songs of Scottish character and oddity, nonsense songs and songs of philosophic “pawkiness” and good sense, songs of scenery and places, and songs of the most tearful pathos. A few are of a distinctively religious character. Passing from matter or subject to quality, one may say that there is a realmoralworth in them all, and that all have that genuine characteristic of a song which consists of an innertunepreceding and inspiring the words, and coiling the words as it were out of the heart along with it. Hence there is not perhaps one of them that, with the advantage they have of being set to known and favourite airs, would not please sufficiently if sung by a good singer. Apart from this general melodiousness or suitability for being sung, the report forallof them might not be so favourable; but, tried by the standard of strict poetic merit, about twenty or twenty-five of the whole number, I should say, might rank as good, while eight or ten of theseare of supreme quality. Would not this, though written by a woman, serve for the rallying of a thousand men for any cause, right or wrong?

“The news frae Moidart cam yestreenWill soon gar mony ferly,For ships o’ war hae just come inAnd landit Royal Charlie.Come through the heather, around him gather;Ye’re a’ the welcomer early;Around him cling wi’ a’ your kin;For wha’ll be King but Charlie?Come through the heather, around him gather,Come Ronald, come Donald, come a’ thegither,And crown your rightfu’, lawfu’ King!For wha’ll be King but Charlie?”

“The news frae Moidart cam yestreen

Will soon gar mony ferly,

For ships o’ war hae just come in

And landit Royal Charlie.

Come through the heather, around him gather;

Ye’re a’ the welcomer early;

Around him cling wi’ a’ your kin;

For wha’ll be King but Charlie?

Come through the heather, around him gather,

Come Ronald, come Donald, come a’ thegither,

And crown your rightfu’, lawfu’ King!

For wha’ll be King but Charlie?”

And what abirrand sense of the situation in the song on Charlie’s entry into Carlisle preceded by a hundred pipers, though that, on the whole, is not one of the best:—

Back to Index Next