CHAPTER IIIBALLAD STRUCTURE AND BALLAD STYLE

'Edinburgh Castle, towne and toure,God grant thou sink for sinne!And that even for the black dinoúrErl 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 ofLittle Musgrave, or trace situations and phrases that reappear inThe Douglas Tragedy,Gil Morice, and their variants.

InJohnie Armstrong o' Gilnockie,The Border Widow, andThe 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 JamesIV.and JamesV.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, whoescape 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 theArt of Poesy'like the sound of a trumpet.'

Thus, like Antæus, 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 agaberlunzie man. In theComplaynt 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—ofGil QuheskherandSir Walter, the Bauld Leslye, pieces now probably lost to us irrecoverably; of the familiarTayl of Yong Tamlane; ofRobene HudeandLitel Ihone, whose fame, like that of the prophecies of Thomas of Ercildoune, had already been firmly established for a couple of centuries;of theRed Etin, whose place in folklore is well ascertained; and of theTayl of the Thre Vierd Systirs, in which one can snuff the ingredients of the caldron inMacbeth. There were dances, founded on the same themes—Robin Hood,Thom of Lyn, andJohnie Ermstrang; and between whiles the women sang 'sueit melodious sangis of natural music of the antiquite, such asThe Hunting of CheviotandThe 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 Beauté, 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 theodium theologicumwhich 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 hadlost 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 thereWe 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 Reidswirehapped in 1575; the expedition ofJamie Telfer of the Fair Dodheadis conjecturally set down for 1582;The Lads of Wamphraycommemorates a Dumfriesshire feud of the year 1593; while the more famous incident sung with immortal fire and vigour inKinmont Willietook place in 1596. To the same period belong the exploits ofDick 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 inNigel, 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 earthlypassion.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.GlenlogieandGeordiewere 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, theBonnie Earl o' Morayfell so far away as Donibristle, in Fife. The mystery of theBurning of Frendraughttook place in 1630; the tragedy ofMill 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' Airlietreats 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 thatfine 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.

'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, orvice versâ, 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 andsingers 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 canbring 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 inThe Broom o' the Cowdenknowes, orBarbara Allan, orThe 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 hearingthem 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 ofBinnorie, orChil' Ether, orThe 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 ofteninterchangeable. 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 fromJohnie 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, naïve 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 forthis 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 'Binnórie, O Binnórie!' 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 inEdward! 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 inplaces 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 kneeWhere the primrose blooms so sweetly.'

'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 kneeWhere 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'.'

'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 goldAnd 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 saughbush' 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 andmärchenof 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 bepeculiar 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 asTiftie'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' ofSir Jamesthe Roseside by side, or comparing verse by verse David Mallet's much vauntedWilliam 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 inpreluding 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 immortalDowie 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 skipperTo sail this ship o' mine.'

Or ofSir James the Rose:

'O, hae ye nae heard o' Sir James the Rose,The young laird o' Balleichan,How he has slain a gallant squireWhose 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 theTwa Sisterswhich Tennyson took as the basis of hisWe 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,'

'The mantle that fair Annie woreIt skinkled in the sun';

'And in at her bower windowThe moon shone like a gleed';

'O'er his white banes when they are bareThe 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 inClerk Saunders?—

'Then he drew forth his bright long brand,And slait it on the strae,And through Clerk Saunders' bodyHe '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 ofEdom 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 faceTo be some man's delight."'

Is there in the many pages of romance a climax so surprising, so overwhelming—a revelation that in itssuccinct and despairing candour goes so straight to the quick of human feeling—as that in the ballad ofGil Morice?—

'"I ance was as fu' o' Gil MoriceAs 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.

'Oh see ye not that bonnie roadThat winds about yon fernie brae?Oh that 's the road to fair ElflandWhere 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 orquasi-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 indicatethe 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 primæval beliefs and superstitions grew up and became embodied in legend and custom, inmärchenand 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 instructionof 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 Faëry and Romance. They furnish examples of nearly all the root-ideas and typical tales which folklorists have discovered in thevast 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 Faëryland, the Seven Years' Kain to Hell, and a host of others.

Certain of them, likeThomas the RhymerandYoung Tamlane, are 'fulfilléd all of Faëry.' 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 Mæræ and Hathors—old imaginingsof 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:

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