CHAPTER VIICONCLUSION

'Then shoulder high, with shout and cry,We bore him down the ladder lang;At every stride Red Rowan madeI 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 RowanI ween my legs have ne'er bestrode."'

'Then shoulder high, with shout and cry,We bore him down the ladder lang;At every stride Red Rowan madeI 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 RowanI 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 waterFor a' the gowd in Christentie."'

History attests the main incidents and characters ofKinmont Willieas 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 streamingwith 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 SideandArchie o' Ca'fieldread almost like variants ofKinmont 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 tyrisFor 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 aliveFor 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. InJohnie ArmstrongandThe Sang o' the Outlaw Murraythe 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-spokenoutlaws, 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 JamesIV.; 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."'

'"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 theLament 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 theComplaynt of Scotlandwas 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 cordNeidis never to be drowned.'

At the bar of judgment of the balladists, the deed was counted murder:

'Scotland's heart was ne'er sae waeTo see sae mony brave men die';

and murder all the less pardonable, since the king whoordered it was himself an inspirer and, as some say, a writer of ballads. As is pointed out in theBorder 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 FairDodhead. 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 DodheadBut 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 ofWaverley, 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 whiteThan 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 Maitlandtreats of an inroad on the opposite side of the country, of more ancient date and moreformidable 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 TeviotdaleAll in an evening late.As they flared up o'er LammermuirThey burned baith up and down,Until they came to a darksome house,Some call it Lauder town.'

'They lighted on the banks of Tweed,And blew their fires so het,And fired the Merse and TeviotdaleAll in an evening late.

As they flared up o'er LammermuirThey 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 recordedin 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 asThe Battle of Otterburn, and the EnglishChevy Chaseare 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 thatThe Battle of Otterburnand 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 exchangedphrases 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 ofChevy 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 bushThat grows upon the lily lee."O bury me by the bracken bush,Beneath the blooming brier;Let never living mortal kenA kindly Scot lies here."'

'"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 bushThat grows upon the lily lee.

"O bury me by the bracken bush,Beneath the blooming brier;Let never living mortal kenA 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.

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 theMinstrelsy, 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. Anddown 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 contentsof 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 ofEarl 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 upbehind 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 hereSae 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-timeI '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 clothingIn 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."'

'She said, "Good-e'en, ye nettles tall,Where ye grow at the dyke;If the auld carline my mother was hereSae 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-timeI '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 clothingIn 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 areChrist's Kirk on the GreenandPeblis 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 toChrist'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 theauthor ofTullochgorum, 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. InPeblis 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-threwOut of the townis untald,Lord, what a shout was them amangQuhen thai were ower the waldTheir westOf Peblis to the play!'

From a phrase used by John Major, it has been suggested that JamesI.of Scots was the writer of this poem; and a note on the BannatyneMS.ofChrist's Kirkattributes 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 theKing's Quair, and whose daughter kissed thelips 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 inThe 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,' JamesV.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 ManandThe 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 Molière in the description, inThe Gaberlunzie Man, of the good-wife's alternate blessing and banning as she makes her morningdiscoveries 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."'

'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 Beggaris 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 knightsCame skipping o'er the hill.And he took out his little knife,Loot a' his duddies fa';And he stood the brawest gentlemanThat was amang them a'.'

'He took his horn from his side,And blew baith loud and shrill,And four-and-twenty belted knightsCame skipping o'er the hill.

And he took out his little knife,Loot a' his duddies fa';And he stood the brawest gentlemanThat 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 isThe 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 ofJohn 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.'

'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, andAllan 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, inJohn 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.'

'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 asThe 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 wasalready 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.

TheGude and Godlie Ballatesof 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, andthe 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 atPeblis to the PlayorChrist'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 thethree 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 popularlays 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 theBattle of Pentland, ofBothwell Brig, ofKilliecrankie, and, to make a leap into another century, ofSheriffmuir. 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 thenationality and identity of the smaller and poorer of the countries. It was in 1706—the year before the Union—that James Watson'sSerious and Comic Scots Poemsmade 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'sEvergreenandTea-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 ofThe Gentle Shepherdhimself—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 theBorder 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, inLeader Haughs, of the grief and changes 'which fleeting Time procureth.'

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