Rough Scan
COMMENTARY
BOOK I
YOUTH AND SPRING
SPRING is a laggard in the North. In April the land is still wintry, the meadows are more yellow than green, buds scarcely show on the trees, the birches are as yet a pale vapour. Remains of old drifts lie behind the dykes, and there are patches of snow on the high tops. You may get an odd day of sun, when the full streams are caught with silver and the clear light sharpens the contours of the hills; but my common recollection of upland Aprils is of grey skies, acres of heather blackened with the moor-burning, and a perpetual wailing of curlews-the atmosphere of that line of Edgar's in his madness,-
="Through the sharp hawthorn blows the cold wind."
Then comes a morning in early May when the world grows warm and austerity falls from it; bird-notes awake, green flushes the face of the earth, and in a week it is the Spring of the poet.
=To the Middle Ages the transition from Winter was like the sudden outburst of Northern Spring, a yearly miracle which in an instant thawed the ice on the streams of poetry and set them singing. Consider the utter discomfort of a medieval winter-time. For the towns outside, the narrow vennels choked with snow and frozen offal or ankle-deep in evil-smelling mud; within, draughts and chills save in the immediate vicinity of the smoky fireplace, arctic sleeping-quarters with the gale howling through the chinks of the unglazed windows; vile food, mostly half-salted beef and mutton which was putrescent by February, no vegetables or fruits, and at the best an occasional fresh meal from a lean deer sent down from the hills; nothing to do in the long dark hours between half-past three and bedtime but con his few books (if a man was a scholar) by candle-light, or listen to interminable twice-told tales. Small wonder that the Middle Ages were prolix-there was an infinity of time to kill. In the country it was little better, for there was little winter sport before the day of the matchlock. Miry roads and flooded waters did indeed give some security to the little castles, but peace meant ennui, unexercised limbs, and ill-nourished bodies. Winter was a pall which lay black on a man's spirit, and made him think, like Dunbar, of his latter end. Then, like a recovery from sickness, came the Spring, and the world awoke. Men went out of their dark dwellings, bemused with sunlighi, drunken with bird song and greenery, marvelling at the common flowers as if they were celestial visitants. Of such sudden awakenings poetry is born. Spring is to us a marvel by a poetic convention, but to the Middle Ages it was in sober reality a new birth.
=In Scots literature we find this high mood of surprise and delight only in and before the sixteenth century. The old poets were all of them scholars after a fashion, and gently and often nobly born; Montgomerie, for example, was of the family of Eglinton, and Dunbar of that fantastic house of March which had for its motto, "_Parmi ceu haut bois conduyrai mamie_." They were students, courtiers, soldiers, men of affairs or high in the Church, and in the draughty courts of palaces and in icy castle chambers they shivered and cursed the Winter. In their writings they rarely mention it, and when they do it is, like Dunbar, penitentially, or, like Gawain Douglas in his seventh Prologue, with a splendid gusto of hate. The thing was too hideous for the Muses. But Spring comes to loose the bonds of their discontent, and they overflow like brooks in thaw. He is blind indeed who cannot detect behind their enamelled and aureate style the rapture of the prisoner set free.
=The mood was not to be recovered. When the vernacular was ]eft to the peasant (except as a condescension on the part of men of letters who thought first of their English style) there was no chance of that sharply felt antagonism. The gently born poets of the so-called Golden Age-Henryson, Dunbar, Montgomerie, Alexander Scott, Lyndsay, down to Hume-excluded Winter from their verse because they detested it, as a bar both to their pleasures and their duties. But popular poetry had never known this ban, and some of the finest of the ballads have their setting in wintry weather. To the poor man one season was much like another-he must get through his day's work in them all; and indeed Winter meant to him a time of comparative rest. Cutting and carrying peats in Summer and ploughing lea in Spring were harder jobs than feeding sheep in fold and cattle in byre with bog hay during the short December days. Winter, too, brought its modest festivities-Hallowe'en, the "blyth Yule night when we were fou," Hogmanay, Handsel Monday-the cotter's Saturday night for the sedate and Poosie Nansie's for the lively. He was used to the elements at all times, and made little of them; the fine gentleman might grumble at the mud and the dark skies, but the poor man took them placidly, and his hearth-fire shone the more brightly because of the dismal out-of-doors.
=Hence in Scots verse of the past two centuries we do not find the medieval exaltation at the coming of Spring. It is taken as a matter of course. Indeed, it may be argued that the Scots Muse is at her best, as in the Ballads, when engaged with bleakness and storm. The poetry of Spring is there, no doubt, but it is conceived in a lower key. A piece like Stevenson's (No. 2) is a recaptured literary mood, not a lyrical cry; "Hugh Haliburton's" is a Dutch picture, and Lady John Scott's song has no more than a temperate joy. We shall never again see the year as that contrast between misery and ecstasy which made Spring to the Middle Ages a miracle and a revelation.
====1
=Ed. Scottish Text Society, II. 233-4. Five stanzas omitted.
====2
=_Underwoods,_ Book II. 3.
====3
=_Horace in Homespun,_ by Hugh Haliburton. "Hughie marks with delight the return of Spring."
====4
=Ed. Scottish Text Society, 193-4. This is the most famous of the lyrics of Alexander Montgomerie, the author of _The Cherrie and the Slae,_ who lived during the latter half of the sixteenth century. Mr. Walter de la Mare has an English version in his _Come Hither,_ page 2, and there is another by Allan Cunningham in his _Songs of Scolland_, I. 274. The bird referred to in the first verse may be the corn-bunting; another version gives "throstle-cock," which would be the thrush. The tune to which the words are written is "Hey tuttie taittie"-one of the oldest of Scots airs, and the one to which Bruce fought the battle of Bannockburn, and which Burns broadened and flattened into "Scots Wha Hae." There must have been many sets of words before Montgomerie's, for Dunbar refers to it, and Gawain Douglas in the prologue to the thirteenth book of his _Eneados_, 177-182 (see page 289, _supra_). It is also-sure proof of a wide popularity-adapted to the uses of theology in _The Gude and Godlie Ballats_.
====5
=Ed. Scottish Text Society, II. 1-2 - first five stanzas. This is the beautiful opening of "The Golden Targe," Dunbar's allegory of love and wisdom. It is in the poet's stateliest heraldic manner-for example, "powderit," which in heraldry is the strewing of a field with small figures, and "goulis," the heraldic "gules." But the sumptuous language does not obscure his keen observation of nature. The fourth stanza is a wonderful picture of a shallow stream at dawn.
====6
=From the Bannatyne MS. (collected by George Bannatyne, a burgess of Edinburgh, 1546 ? - 1608 ?); the last stanza is from the _Aberdeen Cantus_. The piece used to be wrongly attributed to Alexander Scott, who did, indeed, write a May ode, but in a very different manner. It was first printed by Chepman and Myllar in 1508, nearly half a century before Scott's date.
====7
=Ed. Scottish Text Society, II. 183-4. The opening of "The Thistle and the Rose," which Dunbar wrote in honour of the marriage of James IV. and Margaret Tudor in 1503.
====8
=_Songs and Verses_, by Lady John Scott, 1904.
====9
=The opening stanzas of _The Kingis Quair_, which James I. of Scotland wrote in the last year of his captivity in Windsor Castle to commemorate his love for the Lady Jane Beaufort, whom he made his queen. It was probably written in 1423; the earliest manuscript, which is at Oxford, dates from 1475, thirty-eight years after his death during that tragic Christmastide at Perth. The best edition is Dr. Skeat's, published by the Scottish Text Society, 1883.
BOOK II
PLAISIR D'AMOUR
=There is more love poetry in the world than any other kind, and it is all a variation upon half a dozen simple themes, whether it be put in the mouth of man or woman. There is the regal, magnificent note, when the beloved becomes queen and goddess and is praised with litanies. Hazlitt has given us the prose of it: "In her sight there was Elysium; her smile was heaven; her voice was enchantment; the air of love waved round her, breathing balm into my heart; for a little while I had sat with the gods at their golden tables; I had tasted of all earth's bliss." We find it in Dunbar's praise of Mistress Musgrave, and in anonymous early poems like "My heart is heich abufe" and "Baith gud and fair and womanlie," and "When Flora had ourfret the firth;" we find it in Burns's "O, my luve is like a red, red rose" and "Mary Morison" and "O wert thou in the cauld blast." But human nature cannot dwell for long on these hill-tops, so presently the goddess becomes woman, and the love-making grows warm and natural. Scots poetry is extraordinarily rich in the freshest and simplest of love lays, whether they be Burns's masterpieces, "My ain kind dearie" and "O' a' the airts," or Ramsay's "My Peggy is a young thing," or Mrs. Jacob's "Tam i' the Kirk," or of unknown authorship like "The Ewe-Bughts." It is the girl who sings in some of the best, like "The Yellow-hair'd Laddie," "To daunton me," "I lo'e nae a laddie but ane," "Saw ye Johnnie coming?" and "Ca' the yowes to the knowes."
=Humour, too, comes in to correct a sweetness which might otherwise cloy. The girl in the story complained that her lover was "senselessly ceevil," but; many of the pieces do not err on the side of civility. They are bold and candid, but even in the worst of _The Merry Muses_ I see little that is indecent, for ogling and leering are rare. It is a robust affection which can admit the comic without loss of charm, which can be merry and yet gracious. Burns is a master of this type- "O for ane and twenty, Tam," "O whistle and I'll come to ye," "Last May a braw wooer;" and in "The Gowk" Mrs. Jacob walks in the same path.
=Then there are the stock comedies of love, pictures of its inevitable paradoxes, and so we have Henryson's "Robine and Makyn," Burns's "Duncan Gray" and "Tam Glen," Mrs. Jacob's "Change o' Deils," anonymous snatches like "Low doun in the broom," and the graceless ditty which I have called "Kiss'd Yestreen." From these it is but a short step to love's pleasing cares and crosses-the lover at his mistress's window, as in "Let me in this ae night," and "O are ye sleepin', Maggie?" the hopeful severance, as in "For the sake o' somebody" and "Jockie's ta'en the parting kiss," the restoration after long absence, as in "Wandering Willie" and "Logie o' Buchan." I have concluded with Montgomerie's "Adieu to his Mistress," where the confident parting of the lovers is ever so faintly clouded with shadow.
====10
=The authorship of this song is uncertain, but I am inclined to attribute it to Alexander Scott, whose _floruit_ was the middle of the sixteenth century. The matter is that of Scott's "Up, Helsum Heart," but the measure has no parallel among his lyrics.
====11
=Written by Burns for Johnson's Museum in 1796. Almost every line, almost every phrase, is taken from some clumsy original among the black-letter ballads and broadsheets, for which the curious may consult the note in the edition of Henley and Henderson, III. 402-6. Out of this patchwork Bums has shaped one of the great love songs of our literature.
====12
=Ed. Scottish Text Society, II. 223. The lady honoured in these verses has been conjectured to be one Mistress Musgrave, an English waiting-woman of Queen Margaret's, for whose sake Dunbar, in his "Of a Dance in the Queenis Chalmer," wished he were "the grytest erle or duik in France."
====13
=From the Bannatyne MS.
====14
=Contributed to Thomson's _Select Collection_. Burns worked on an old set of words, and a version by Robert Fergusson had already appeared in Johnson's _Museum_.
====15
=Written by Burns during his honeymoon shortly after his arrival at Ellisland. Third and fourth stanzas of little merit are sometimes printed, the work of an Edinburgh music-seller called Hamilton, in which the lady is described with profound anti-climax as "aye sae neat and clean."
====16
=This set of words and the tune (after "Auld Lang Syne" perhaps the best known of Scottish airs) were the work of Lady John Scott. Annie Laurie was the daughter of Laurie of Maxwelltown in Glencairn, and married the neighbouring laird of Craigdarroch. The old version is ascribed by Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe (_A Ballad Book_, 1824, page 107) to Douglas of Fingland, and is said to have been written about 1680.
="Maxwellton banks are bonnie
==Whar early fa's the dew;
=Whar me and Annie Laurie
==Made up the promise true.
==Made up the promise true,
==And never forget will I;
=And for bonnie Annie Laurie
==I'd lay me down and die.
=She's backit like the peacock,
==She's breastit like the swan;
=She's jimp about the middle,
==Her waist ye weel micht span.
==Her waist ye weel micht span,
==And she has a rolling eye;
=And for bonnie Annie Laurie
==I'd lay me down and die."
====17
=This song was first printed in Allan Ramsay's _Tea-Table Miscellany_, 1724, and marked as an "old song with additions." It is a pastoral of the Lowlands, and, judging from the place-names in certain versions, of the valleys of Tweed and Ale. See Chambers's _Scottish Songs_, II. 348.
====18
="I'll gang nae mair to yon toun" is an old air, which is echoed in many vagabond snatches, and by Burns a second time in "O wat ye wha's in yon town." It is the undercurrent in William Bell Scott's ballad on page 349.
====19
=From _The Gentle Shepherd_. It is difficult to dissociate the words from the tune, one of the most beautiful of the old Border viol airs.
====20
=_Songs of Angus, 1915.
====21
=The first two stanzas of the version in Ramsay's _Tea-Table Miscellany_, 1724. There is another and much inferior text in Cunningham's _Songs of Scotland_, III. 155.
====22
=Tt is not dear how large a part Burns had in this adaptation from the Jacobite broadside, which is found as early as 1750 in a collection of _Loyal Songs_, and of which there are many versions. One of these is given by Chambers, _Scottish Songs_, II. 355, and the best is in Hogg's _Jacobite Relics_, II. 88.
"To daunton me, to daunton me,
D'ye ken the thing that wad daunton me?
Eighty-eight and eighty-nine,
And a' the dreary years sinsyne
With cess and press and Presbyt'ry;
Gude faith, this had like to daunton me.
But to wanton me, to wanton me,
D'ye ken the thing that wad wanton me?
To see gude corn upon the rigs,
And a gallows high to hang the Whigs,
And right restored where right should be;
O, these are the things that wad wanton me.
But to wanton me, but to wanton me,
And ken ye what maist wad wanton me?
To see King James at Edinburgh Cross
With fifty thousand foot and horse,
And the Usurper forced to flee:
O, this is what maist wad wanton me."
====23
=Printed first by Ritson with the initials "I.D." attached, the version I have given seems to have been the work of the Rev. John Clunie, the minister of Ewes, who gave Burns the old words of "Ca' the yowes to the knowes." The song commonly met with is the work of Hector Macneill, who borrowed Clunie's first stanza and added four indifferent ones of his own. My text is that of Allan Cunningham, _Songs of Scotland_, III. 259.
====24
=Generally accredited to Joanna Baillie (1762-1851), the dramatist of the Passions and the friend of Scott; but she had an early version to work on which Burns praised highly, and she did little more than expand in each stanza the first quatrain. The old words will be found in Cunningham, II. 168.
====25
=Burns wrote a second version which he sent to Thomson, and which is printed in Henley's edition, III. 268. The text here given was based on an older song which Burns heard from the Rev. John Clunie. There seems no evidence for Laing's tradition that the old version, which is given in Stenhouse and in Johnson's _Museum_, was the work of one Isobel Pagan, the keeper of an ale-house near Muirkirk. But whoever the author was, the old copy has some admirable verses, not improved by Burns, such as-
"Yon yowes and lammies on the plain
Wi' a' the gear my dad did hain,
I'se gie thee, if thou'lt be my ain,
My bonnie dearie."
====26
=From Cunningham's _Songs of Scotland_, IV. 241.
====28
=Sent to Thomson in 1793. Burns wrote an earlier version of eight lines for Johnson in 1788 (Henley, III. 304). The chorus is old, and is found in the Herd MS.
====30
=_Songs of Angus_, 1915.
====31
=This fragrant old pastoral-in a ballad metre and with no trace of Chaucerian influence-has for its theme the converse of Burns's "Duncan Gray." Henryson lived in the third quarter of the fiftcenth century, and is said to have been the schoolmaster of Dunfermline. The poem is in the Bannatyne MS., and was first introduced to the modern world by Ramsay's _Ever Green_.
====32
="That kind of lighthorse gallop of an air which precludes sentiment," Burns wrote, in sending the piece to Thomson. He has another version (Henley, III. 23), and both were based on an unprintable original to be found in the Herd MS. and _The Merry Muses_. The "feast day when we were fou" appears in perhaps the oldest Scots song which has been preserved to us, "The Wowing of Jok and Jynny," in the Bannatyne MS., which Ramsay printed in his _Tea-Table Miscellany_.
====33
=_More Songs of Angus and Others_, 1918.
====34
=Versions, slightly different, will be found in Chambers and Cunningham; I have omitted the last two stanzas. The song in its present form is said to have been written by Carnegie of Balnamoon, an Angus laird who was out in the '45. The chorus is ancient, and is referred to in _The Complaynt of Scotland_.
====35
=Cunningham, II. 248. This song of a merry and complaisant lady is a variant which Cunningham quotes of a much inferior ballad, said to be based on an adventure of one of the Argylls. Its scene is seventeenth-century Glasgow.
====37
=From Cunningham's _Songs of Scotland_, II. 213. I prefer Cunningham's version of a tale and a refrain which belong to the ancien try of folk-song. Something of the kind is imitated in _The Gude and Godlie Ballats_ (see page 440, _supra_); there is a text in Herd (1769) which Burns remodelled (Henley, III. 274). Burns's other songs on the theme-for example, "Wha is that at my bower door?" and "Open the door to me O," and the piece by Tannahill which follows, are of the same family.
====38
=To my mind the best of Tannahill's lyrics. It is based on a ribald old song which is now lost, but the memory of which is preserved in the "Sleeping Maggie," which used to be a popular barn dance in the Lowlands.
====39
=This famous lyric was sent to Thomson in 1793 by Burns, who described it as "one of my juvenile works-not very remarkable either for its merits or its demerits." Henley suggests that he borrowed the metrical scheme of it from the piece printed below-which he may have seen in _The Ever Green_.
====40
=The only poem in old Scots which approaches the rhyme scheme of the French _ballade_. It is from the Bannatyne MS., and, though sometimes given to Alexander Scott, is probably much earlier. Ramsay, in _The Ever Green_, attributes it to "Stewart," who may be the otherwise unknown poet mentioned by Sir David Lyndsay in the Prologue to the _Papynge_.
====41
=A noble song with a most tragic provenance. It was written by Burns at Dumfries, during his last illness, in honour of Jessie Lewars, the sister of a fellow-exciseman, who helped the struggling household and played old airs to the dying poet.
====42
=There are two songs besides that of Burns on "Somebody"-which was perhaps originally a Jacobite toast-one in Ramsay's _Tea-Table Miscellany_ (I. 191) with the same chorus, and one included in Hogg's _Jacobite Relics_ (II. 47), which is probably by Hogg himself. This last has a definite Jacobite flavour.
"If somebody were come again,
Then somebody maun cross the main,
And ilka ane will get his ain,
And I will see my somebody.
O! I hae grutten mony a day
For ane that's banish'd far away:
I canna sing and mauna say
How sair I grieve for somebody."
====44
=This is the old version from Herd, which I prefer to Burns's set (Henley, III. 208). The words are inseparable from the air, almost the most haunting of Scots melodies-"the saddest of our country tunes which sets folk weeping in a tavern" (_The Master of Ballantrae_, chapter ix.). Stevenson wrote words to the air, beginning: "Home no more home to me, whither must I wander?" (_Songs of Travel_, XII.).
====45
=Peter Buchan, not the best of authorities, claimed this piece for George Halkett, the Jacobite schoolmaster of Rathen in Aberdeenshire, who died in 1756.
====46
=Ed. Scottish Text Society, 189. The daisy was Montgomerie's flower, as it was Chaucer's. The pleasant lilting measure is the same as that of _The Cherrie and the Slae_.
BOOK III
CHAGRIN D'AMOUR
=Montgomerie's tail-piece to the last section leads us naturally to Alexander Scott's "Farewell," in which rapture is touched with sorrow, and presently to the same author's "Roundel of Luve," of which the conclusion is that the price out-weighs the pleasure, and to "Ay Waukin O," which is all hopeless longing. After that we are in the midst of love's tragedies-the poor maid jilted for the well-dowered, the Master of Erskine's lament for a lost mistress, the woe of the deserted mother who calls on the Martinmas wind and gentle Death, and the protest against life's ironies of the girl who has married to save the household from want and abides with a noble honesty by her bargain-"I darena think on Jamie, for that wad be a sin." And so we reach the great tragic poems of Burns, "Ye Banks and Braes" and "Ae Fond Kiss." The latter, as austere and poignant as a verse of Sappho, is followed by the sonnet in which Mark Boyd, like some lyrist of the Greek Anthology, turns his back for good and all upon Venus, the
=="wife ingenrit of the sea,
=And lichter nor a dauphin with her fin."
=The section is small because, though ready enough to make love songs, the poets of Scotland have been notably free from any obsession of sex, and are not inclined to devote themselves to its pathology, or, overmuch, to its sorrows. They have usually been of the mind of Dr. Johnson, who declared that poetry was seldom worse employed than to celebrate the ravings of a love-sick girl, and of Shakespeare, in whose greatest tragedies sex plays but a small part. They are ribald enough, but they are free from the solemn sententious lewdness of certain moderns. They can imagine far worse misfortunes for a man than being crossed in love. The loss of a wife or a child, a friend or a cause, seems to these heretics more tragic than the loss of a mistress or a lover. This will be ascribed to good sense or to obtuseness, according to the reader's philosophy.
====47
=Scott wrote a pendant to this, a song of a disillusioned lover, of which the following in the first verse :-
'Returne thee hamewart, hairt, agane,
And bide whair thou was want to be;
Thou art ane fule to suffer bane,
For Luve of her that luvis not thee.
My hairt, lat be sic fantasie,
Luve nane bot as they mak' thee cause,
And lat her seik ane hairt for thee,
For feind a crum of thee scho fawis."
====48
=Scott was familiar with the work of Wyatt and Surrey, and this piece, as Mr. T. F. Henderson has pointed out, is a condensed and improved version of Wyatt's "Absent Lover."
====49
=I give the version which I have always heard sung. In the main it is Burns's, but one verse belongs to the text printed by Robert Chambers (_Scottish Songs_, I. 126), though Chambers's last verse is omitted. The first stanza and the chorus are old, and are found in the Herd MS. It is permissible to quote Dr. John Brown (_Horae Subsecivae_, third series, 305) :-
="A ploughman or shepherd-for I hold that it is a man's song-comes in 'wat, wat' after a hard day's work among the furrows or on the hill. The _watness_ of wat, wat, is as much wetter than wet as a Scotch mist is more of a mist than an English one; and he is not only wat, wat, but 'weary,' longing for a dry skin and a warm bed and rest; but no sooner said and felt, than, by the law of contrast, he thinks on 'Mysie' or 'Ailie,' his Genevieve; and then 'all thoughts, all passions, all delights' begin to stir him, and 'fain wad I rise and rin' (what a swiftness beyond run' is 'rin !). Love now makes him a poet; the true imaginative power enters and takes possession of him. By this time his clothes are off, and he is snug in bed; not a wink can he sleep; that 'fain' is domineering over him-and he breaks out into what is as genuine passion and poetry as anything from Sappho to Tennyson--abrupt, vivid, heedless of syntax. 'Simmer's a pleasant time.' Would any of our greatest geniuses, being limited to one word, have done better than take 'pleasant'? and then the fine vagueness of 'time'! 'Flowers o' every colour;' he gets a glimpse of 'herself a fairer flower,' and is off in pursuit. 'The water rins over the heugh' (a steep precipice); flinging itself wildly, passionately over, and so do I long for my true lover. Nothing can be simpler and finer than
When I sleep. I dream;
=When I wauk, I'm eerie.'
'Lanely nicht:' how much richer and more touching than 'darksome.' 'Feather beds are saft;' 'pentit rooms are bonnie;' I would infer from this, that his 'dearie,' his true love,' was a lass up at 'the big house'- a dapper Abigail possibly-at Sir William's at the Castle."
====50
=First printed in the _Tea-Table Miscellany_ and _Orpheus Caledonius_. Lady Grizel Baillie (1665-1746) was the heroic daughter of the Covenanting Earl of Marchmont, and married George Baillie of Jerviswood, the son of her father's friend. Her story may be read in the Memoir by her daughter, Lady Murray of Stanhope, 1822. The refrain is almost certainly much earlier.
====51
=From the Bannatyne MS. The Master of Erskine, who was the lover of the Queen Regent, fell in 1547 at the Battle of Pinkie.
====52
=This, the noblest of all the anonymous songs of Scotland, is strangely obscure in its origins. Several stanzas of it were transferred to the late ballad of "Jamie Douglas" (No. 204 in Professor Child's collection), and consequently the song has been sometimes entitled "The Marchioness of Douglas's Lament," but it has no proven relation to the incident in the ballad. It first appeared in the _Tea-Table Miscellany_, and then in the second edition of _Orpheus Caledonius_, where an additional verse was printed-
"When cockle shells turn siller bells,
=And mussels grow on every tree:
When frost and snaw shall warm us a'
=Then shall my love prove true to me"-
a verse which is found in a slightly different form in the ballad. "Waly, waly" may be Shakespeare's "Willow, willow." According to Mr. T. F. Henderson, the song is in the Percy Folio MS. of 1650, and a parody occurs in a MS. which may be as early as 1620.
====53
=Lady Anne Barnard (1750-1825) was Lady Anne Lindsay, a daughter of the Earl of Balcarres. "Auld Robin Gray" is, apart from Burns's work and "Annie Laurie," perhaps the most popular of Scottish songs, and it is in its own way a masterpiece, for it moves with sure step on the very brink of a sentiment which might easily become mawkish. That, I suppose, is the definition of a popular piece which is also literature.
====55
=The second and third quatrains are omitted-the latter surely the worst verse ever written by a poet. The four remaining stanzas seem to me to be the greatest of Burns's songs, and, along with one or two from Shakespeare and Shelley and Catullus, among the greatest in all literature. "At moments," Matthew Arnold wrote, "he touches it (that is, high seriousness) in a profound and passionate melancholy, as in those four immortal lines taken by Byron as the motto for "The Bride of Abydos," but which have in them a depth of poetic quality such as resides in no verse of Byron's own- 'Had we never loved sae kindly,' etc." The germ is to be found in some doggerel by Robert Dodsley, beginning, "One fond kiss before we part."
====56
=Mark Alexander Boyd (1563-1601), of the Ayrshire family of the Boyds of Penkill, was scholar, wanderer, and soldier of fortune, and a writer of admirable Latin verse, for which see Arthur Johnston, _Deliciae Poetarum Scotorum_, 1637.
BOOK IV
THE HEARTH
=In the poetry of a poor and clannish people, living a life of toil in a climate mainly inclement, the hearth and all that it connotes must play a major part. The family is a man's private sanctuary, in which he is barricaded against the "fierce confederate storm" of the outer world. Domestic sentiment has produced some of the worst of Scots verse, and some of the best. The sense of cosiness and security belongs to the "but-and-ben" rather than tot he castle; the "Saturday night" is for the cotter and not for the noble, and no baron's hall could give the snugness of Fergusson's "Farmer's Ingle." But I have tried to make the collection representative of all side of Scots life, for, happily, family love is not the prerogative of a class. We have the expectant bride in Burns's defiant song, and in the romantic stanzas of the ballad. The perfect housewife is portrayed in Henryson's stately manner as well as in the homely verse of "My wife's a winsome wee thing." The whoel range of fireside content will be found in "Bessie at her spinning-Wheel" and the famous lines from "The Epistle to Dr. Blacklock," and in those perfect pictures of the fisher wife, "There's nae luck about the house." and "Oh, weel may the boatie row." There are cradle songs or the beginning of things, and "John Anderson, my jo" for the end. There is the other side, too-the slattern and the randy, the lady who demands a side-saddle, gold rings, and serving-men; the feckless gossip of Fergusson's lines, the deplorable spouse of Willie Wastle, and the gently-born wife who has to be taught housewifery by stern methods. I have added two famous domestic comedies, "Get up and bar the door," and "Tak' your auld cloak about ye," the latter of which has been sung at both Scots and English firesides for four hundred years.
====58
=The opening verse of "The Lass of Lochryan" (Child, No. 76). There are thirteen versions extant, and the comb in the tenth line is given variously as "haw bayberry" (which may be laurel-wood), "red river" (which is perhaps red ivory), and "new-made silver," which explains itself. I incline to "haw bayberry" for the beauty and mystery of its sound, and refuse to believe that it is merely a corruption of "braw ivory."
====59
=From the Bannatyne MS.
====60
=From "The Epistle to Dr. Blacklock," Henley, II. 130.
====61
=The refrain appears in a song in the Percy Folio MS., dating from about 1560, satirizing the Church sacraments :-
"John Anderson, my jo, cum in as ye gae by,
And ye sall get a sheip's heid weel baken in a pye-
Weel baken in a pye, and a haggis in a pat;
John Anderson, my jo, cum in and ye'se get that."
In Burns's day there was also current another and most Rabelaisian version, which is printer in _The Merry Muses_.
====63
=First printed in a slightly different form in johnson's _Museum_.
====64
=Written by Robert Jamieson (1780-1844) to the old tune, "My wife's a wanton wee thing," and published in his _Popular Songs and Ballads_, 1806, II. 328.
====65
=Five stanzas omitted. This vigorous piece was in all likelihood the inspiration of Burns's "Cotter's Saturday Night."
====66
=This is in substance the version printed in Herd with Mickle's rearrangement, but without his added stanzas and without the additions of James Beattie. A copy exists in Mickle's handwriting, but I cannot think that that most anglified of Scots, with his slender and genteel talent, had much to do with its composition; nor can we credit it to Jean Adam, the Greenock schoolmistress. Burns said that it "came frech on the streets as a ballad about 1771 or 1772," and with Mr. Henderson, I suspect a Jacobite original.
====68
=From Johnson's _Museum_. Burns attributed the song to one John Ewen, and Aberdeem merchant (1741-1821), but the chorus is certainly much older.
====69
=This brisk ditty is the converse of the preceding-the confession of the undomestic fishwife. The text is in Chambers and in Cunningham, and was taken by them from Kirkpatricj Sharpe's _Ballad Book_, published in Edinburgh in 1824.
====70
=From _An Eclogy : Willie and Sandy_.
====71
=Willie Wastle himself belongs ot the oldest strata of Scots nursery rhyme. Linkumdoddie is on the Tweed, three miles below Tweedsmuir. Willie wove his customers own wool and stole it ("stown a clue")
====72
=This is Herd's version. There are three others, which may be found in Child, No. 275.
====73
=This ballad story is very old in popular poetry, and Child has seven versions. The one I have chosen is the chapbook text given in the second series of Mr. Robert Ford's _Vagabond Songs and Ballads of Scotland_, 1901. In two of Child's versions the refrain is "hollin Green Hollin" and "Bend your Bow, Robin." The song is akin to the "Wee Cooper o' Fife," which possesses a most complicated and rollicking refrain. A variant of the Fife song is quoted by Jamieson, _Popular Ballads and Songs_, I. 324 :-
There lives a landart laird in Fife,
And he has married a dandily wife;
She wadna shape nor yet wad she sew,
But sat wi' her cummers and filled hersel' fou.
She wadna spin nor yet wad she card,
But she wad sit and crack wi' the laird.
He is down to his sheep-fauld
And cleekit a wether by the back spauld.
He's whirled aff the gude wether's skin,
And wrappit the dandily lady therein.
'I darena pay ye for your dandily kin,
But weel may I skelp my wether's skin.'"
====74
=First published in the _Tea-Table Miscellany_, but probably dating fromt he late sixteenth century. The first part of the fourth stanza is quoted in an English version by Shakespeare in _Othello_.
BOOK V
THE OPEN ROAD
=The Scots are, I suppose, along with the Jews, the most far-wandering race on earth; but, unlike the Jews, they are eternally homesick. In the section of this book which I had called "Lacrimae Rerum" the tears are mainly those of the exile. From the early Middle Ages they travelled Europe, penetrating as pedlars to the extemes of Muscovy, serving as soldiers of fortune in every army, but there is no record of much delight in those journeys. It was the compulsion of poverty that drove them overseas, and the boat that rocked for them at the Pier o' Leith had no charms of its own. I cannot find much that delight in _foreign_ adventure for its own sake which characterized the Elizabethans, or any of the "for to admire and for to see" passion which Mr. Kipling has sung. Perhaps the reason was that they were nto notably a race of seafarers, and so missed the highest romance of pioneering. For them to go abroad was to leave their home, and, however glittering the rewards might be, it was still exile. Stevenson has described this constant mood of his countrymen :-
="There is no special loveliness in that grey country, with its rainy, sea-beat archipelago; its fields of dark mountains; its unsightly places black with coal; its tree-less, sour, unfriendly-looking cornlands; its quaint, grey, castled city, where the bells clash of a Sunday, and the wind squalls, adn the salt showers fly and beat. I do not even know if I desire to live there; but let me hear, in some far land, a kindred voice sing out, 'Oh, why left I my hame?' and it seems at once as if no beauty under the kind heavens, and no society of the wise and good, can repay me for my absence from my country"
=But in their character, besides its prose and practicality, and as deep as its devotion to home, there is an element of sheer "daftness," a perpetual expectation of some strange destiny. The Scots, even when like saul he is tending his father's asses, has half a hope of stumbling upon a kingdom. The most decorous figures have in them a capacity for suprising flights, as when Bailie Nicol Jarvie with a red-hot coulter singed the plaid of the Highlander at Aberfoyle. This perpetual hald-regretful instinct vanquishes common sense and obliterated even the prospect of exile. Hence in Scots poetry we find the bugles often sounding and the pipes of Pan at their secret work. The greenwood and the fire by the burnside, the strange road and the hazards of battle, never lose their compelling power. Leezie Lindsay goes off to the Highlands with her lover; the southron lady listens to the wooing of Jock o' Hazeldeanl the challenge of Bonnie Dundee stirs the most whiggishl the king's young daughter flings away her seam at the call of Spring; and the mistress of the castle trips down the stairs at the song of the gipsy.
====75
=The first two verses of "The King's Dochter Lady Jean," Child, No. 52.
====76
=The first line is old-possibly the first quatrain.
====77
=There are at least seven versions of this song; I have chosen the one in Chambers. Burns sent the first verse, slightly altered, to Johnson. A tradition in the Mearns says that the lady was a daughter of Lindsay of Edzell. The song is probably based ont he well-known balled of "Lizie Linday," Child, No. 266.
====78
=Scott took the first verse from the ballad of "John of Hazelgreen" in the Kinlock MS., Child, No. 293.
====79
=Child, No. 200-twelve versions. The text given is from the _Tea-Table Miscellany_. In the eighteenth century the story came-without foundation-to be connected with the house of Cassilis; and the ballad in C. K. Sharpe's version begins, "The gypsies they came to my lord Cassilis' yett," and ends with the bringing back of the lady. Stevenson (_Essays of Travel_, page 140) follows this legend. He is writing of the old castle of Maybole :-
="A very heavy string-course runs round the upper story, and just above this, facing up the street, the tower carries a small oriel window, fluted and corbelled and carved about with stone heads. It is so ornate it has somewhat the air of a shrine. And it was, indeed, the casket of a very precious jewel, for in the room to which it gave light lay, for long years, the heroine of the sweet old ballad of 'Johnnie Faa'-she who, at the call of the gipsies' songs, 'came tripping down the stair, and all her maids before her.' Some people say the ballad has no basis in fact, and have written, I believe, unanswerable papers to the proof. But in the face of all that, the very look of that high oriel window convinces the imagination, and we enter into all the sorrows of the imprisoned dame. We conceive the burthen of the lang, lack-lustre days, when she leaned her sick head against the mullions, and saw the burghers loading in the Maybole High Street, and the children at play, and ruffling gallants riding by from hunt or foray. We conceive the passion of odd moments when the wind threw up to her some snatch of song, and her heart grew hot within her, and her eye overflowed at the meory of the past. And even if the tale be not true of this or that lady, or this or that old tower, it is true in the essence of all men and women: for all of use, some time or other, hear the gipsies singing; over all of us is the glamour cast. Some resist and sit resolutely byt hte fire. Most go and are brough back again, like Lady Cassilis. A few, of the tribe of Waring, go and are seen no more; only now and again, at springtime, when the gipsies' song is afloat int he amethyst evening, we can catch their voices in the glee."
====80
=Mr T. F. Henderson thinkgs that Scott's model was one of D'Urfey's songs, which, in turn was a parody of an old Scots catch. Scott's note in his diary for December 22, 1825, on the eve of his catastrophe, runs :-
="The air of 'Bonnie Dundee' running in my head to-day, I wrote a few verses to it before dinner, taking the keynote from the store of Clavers leaving the Scottish Convention of Estates in 1688-9. I wonder if they are good. Ah! poop WIll Erskine! Thou couldst and wouldst have told me. I must consult J. B., who is as honest as was W.E. But then, though he has good taste too, there is a little of _Big Bow-wow_ about him. Can't say what has made me take a frisk so uncommon of late years as to write verses of free will. I suppose the same instinct which makes birds sing when the storm has blown over."
Alas! it had not. Adolphus mentions the fire and spirit with which Scott was wont to recite this ballad of his.
====81
=From _Ane Pleasant Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis_ (c. 1540), Part II. "Oppressioun" is speaking. It should be compared with Sir Richard Maitland's views of Liddesdale and its habits (page 220, _supra_).
====82
=From _The Tea-Table Miscellany_. Bishop Percy was inclined to attribute the song to james V. of Scotland; but there is neither external evidence nor intrinsic probability for the attribution. It is one of a number of ballads about bold beggars, like "The Beggar Laddie" (Child, No. 280) adn "The jolly Beggar," first printed by Herd. The latter has a delightful chorus which was imitated by Byron :-
"We'll go no more a-roving,
=A-roving in the night,
We'll go no more a-roving,
=Let the moon shine e'er so bright."
====84
=_Poems_, 1919. Walter Wingate (1865-1918) was a mathematical master in a Hamilton school, whose verse has been selected and published by Mr. Adam L. Gowans (Glasgow : Gowans and Gray).
BOOK VI
KING AND COMMONWEAL
=For a people so tenacious of nationality there was but a small output of patrotic poetry between Barbour's _Bruce_ and Burns's "Scots Wha Hae," though since the latter there has been enough and to spare. After Bannockburn the kings were the chief patriots; the great nobles were at odds with the throne and with each other, and often intriguing with England, and the plain man was only by fits and starts conscious of a national interest-save for the folk of the Borders, who had their own good reasons for perpetual bickering. Hence it is impossible to present the main march of Scots history in quotations from the poets. The ancient _cantus_ which I have put first, the short extracts from Barbour and Blind Harry (poets who do not readily permit of selection), "Sir Patrick Spens," "Harlaw" (which settled that Highlands should not rule Lowlands), and the Reformers' song that _The Gude and Godlie Ballats_, alone are in the central national tradition. Most of the ballads treat of private encounters and family feuds; even "Otterbourne" is the story rather of a fray between Douglas and Percy than between Scotland and England. The great riding ballads are intensely local; "Kinmont Willie," which I have chosen, and which seems to me the best, is the one which brings us nearest to a national issue. I would fain have added "The Fray of Suport," but its joyous barbarity is perhaps too remote from poetry.
=It is the losing cause which pleases the Muses, and with the downfall of the Stuarts public affairs became matter for the bard. I have printed one Whig piece, "Killicrankie," which admirably sets forth the point of view of the average man who had no stomach for fighting on either side. The Jacobite poems, whether by Burns-and one of his greatest, "It was a' for our rightfu' king," is Jacobite-or by unknown makers, are the swan-song of that mediaeval loyalty which had to be broken before the country could advance in modern ways, but which has a sentimental eternity, since it enshrines the regret of all men in all ages for vanished hopes and dreams. A cause, which in England produced only doggerel, was the parent in Scotland of two of her greatest novels and many of her best songs. Prince Charlie, his frailties forgotten, became an incarnation of youth and quicotry, and ageless figure like Arthur, _rex quondam rexque futurus_.
="In a Highland cottage I heard some time ago a man singing a lament for 'Tearlach Og Aluinn," Bonnie Prince Charlie; and when he ceased tears were ont eh face of each that was there, and in his own throat a sob. I asked him, later, was his heart really so full of the Prionnsa Ban, but he told me that it was not him he was thinking of, but of all the dead men and women of Scotland who had died for his sake, and of Scotland itself, and of the old days that would not come again. I did not ask what old days, for I knew that in his heart he lamented his own dead hopes and dreams, and that the Prince was but the image of his lost youth, and that the world was old and grey because of his own weariness and his own grief."
=The Great War is, I fear, poorly represented. The truth is that it brought forth a flood of Scots verse, but mostly in the manner of the penny reciter. "I Canna See the Sergeant" has fascinated me since I first heard it, and one of the best of the war poems in any language, byt he same author, will be found in another section, No. 234.
====85
=Probably the oldest Scots verse-written after the death of Alexander III, in 1285. It is from Wyntoun's _Chronicle_, 1425.
====86
=Child, No. 58. This great ballad was first published in Percy's _reliques_, and there was some eighteen versions. Its historical basis is obscure, but it _may_ refer to the voyage of the Princess Margaret of Scotland, who was married to Prince Eric of Norway in 1281. I have taken the text given by Scott in the _Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border_, except for the last verse, which is from Percy.
====87
=_The Bruce_, Book I. 226-41.
====88
=_Wallace_, Book X. 563-76.
====89
=The ballad of Elspeth of the Craigburnfoot, in _The Antiquary_, chapter Xl.
====90
=Child, No. 161. There are six version, and I have chosen Scott's text in the second edition fo the _Minstrelsy_, based on copies supplied by James Hogg, which seems to me to be poetically the finest. Otterburn was fought on August 19, 1388, at the foot of Redesdale-for an account of which haunted country let the reader consult Mr. G. M. Trevelyan's essay on "The Middle Marches" in his _Clio : A Muse_, 1913.
====91
=From _And Compendious Booke of Godlie Psalmes and Spirituall Sangis_, commonly known as _The Gude and Godlie Ballats_, collected by James, John, and Robert Wedderburn of Dundee. The first known edition is 1567. It was edited by David Laing in 1868, and by Professor Mitchell for the Scottish Text Society in 1897. The ballads are mainly theological adaptations of old hunting songs and love lays. I have omitted five stanzas. Scott, it will be remembered, uses one verse in _The Abbot_, capter xv.
====92
=Child, No. 186-from Scott's _Minstrelsy_. Sir Walter confessed that he got the ballad in a mangled state, and had to admit certain conjectural emendations. Verses 10-12 and 31 seem to betray his hand. On the whole question of Scott's treatment of his originals, see Andrew Lang, _Sir Walter Scott and the Border Mintrelsy_, 1910.
====93
=There are other Killicrankie ballads, such as the excellent on in Herd (1776). The one in the text is from Johnson's _Museum_, and may possibly have passed through the hands of Burns. The additional stanza is from Cunningham's version, _Songs of Scotland_, III. 183.
====94
=William Gordon, 6th Viscount Kenmure, rose int eh '15, was taken at Preston,a nd suffered death on Tower Hill on February 24, 1716. There is little doubt that the whole song is by Burns, though Cromek in his _Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song_, 1810, calls it traditional, and prints some very weak supplementary verses.
====95
=_Poetical Works_, 1923. I. 51.
====96
=The chorus is old, and is in the Herd MS. Hogg has a set in hsi _Jacobite Relics_, I. 76, with additional verses, which are probably his own composition.
====97
=The chorus is old, and though the song is mainly his, Burns must have had a North Country original to work on, for John Ross was the ferryman at the Waterside of Birse on the Dee, just above Aboyne (see _The Old Deeside Road_, by G. M. Fraser, 154); so Peter Buchan may not have been so far out in his view of the genesis of the song as Mr. Henley thinks. Hogg (_Jacobite Relics_, II. 76) prints an extra verse, presumably his own :-
"I ance had sons but now hae nane:
=I bred them toiling sairly;
And I wad bear them a' again,
=And lose them a' for Chairlie."
====98
=The last two verses are omitted. Alexander Geddes (1737-1802) was a Roman Catholic chaplain in Aberdeenshire, and Lewie Gordon was Lord Lewis Gordon, a son of the Duke of Gordon, who raised a regiment for Prince Charlie.
====99
="Drumossie" is Culloden, where the battle was fought on April 16, 1746. The "cruel lord" of the last verse is the Duke of Cumberland.
====100
=William Glen (1789-1826) was a Glasgow man who appears to have written nothing else. The song is in Hogg's _Jacobite Relics_, II. 192. It is sung to the tune of "The Gypsy Laddie," to which goes also the ballad of " Johnie Faa."
====101
=Chambers, I. 125. The lady was the mother of Francis Keith, Frederick the Great's field-marshal, whose body lies under a proud monument in the Garrison Church of Berlin.
====102
=_Poetical Works_, I. 62. At Laffen, William, Duke of Cumberland, was defeated and nearly captured by the Scots and Irish in the French service. Prince Charlie is said to have served there as a volunteer. This song of Andrew Lang's is the best, I think, of the many on the theme, "Oh, it's hame, hame, hame." The refrain and the last verse are old-1750 or thereabouts. When I was a boy in Tweeddale I used to hear a version which I have never met with since, and of which two lines ran :-
"There's an eye that ever weeps and a fair face will be fain
When I ride through Annan water wi' my bonnie bands again."
Allan Cunningham has a set which I transcribe for the sake of the first verse :-
"Hame, hame, hame! O hame fain wad I be!
O hame, hame, hame, to my ain countrie!
When the flower is i' the bud, and the leaf is on the tree,
The lark shall sing me hame to my ain countrie.
=Hame, hame, hame! O hame fain wad I be!
=O hame, hame, hame, to my ain countrie!
The gleen leaf o' loyalties begun for to fa';
The bonnie white rose it is withering an' a';
But we'll water't wi' the blude of usurping tyrannie,
And fresh it shall blaw in my ain countrie.
=Hame, hame, hame! O hame fain wad I be!
=O hame, hame, hame, to my ain countrie!
O there's naught now frae ruin my country can save,
But the keys o' kind heaven, to open the grave,
That a' the noble martyrs, who died for loyaltie,
May rise again and fight for their ain countrie.
=Hame, hame, hame! O hame fain wad I be!
=O hame, hame, hame, to my ain countrie!
The great now are gane-a' wha ventured to save;
The green grass is growing abune their grave;
Yet the sun thro' the mirk blinks blithe in my e'e:
I'll shine on ye yet in your ain countrie.'
=Hame, hame, hame! Hame fain wad I be!
=O hame, hame, hame, to my ain countrie!"
====103
=_Ballads of Battle_, 1916-a song of the 4th Black Watch. To appreciate its truth the reader must have a memory of the trenches in France, and the tune of "Ho-ro, my nut-brown maiden," running in his head.
====104
=_Poems Scots and English_, 1917.
====105
=_Scottish University Verse_, 1918-23.
BOOK VII
THE HUMAN COMEDY
=If my book were a thesaurus and not an anthology, this section would fill many pages. Comedy must be given a wide interpretation, stretching from the dignity of "Auld Lang Syne" and Burns's philosophy of classes to something very like broad farce, and including all the humours and incongruities of men and women in their social relations. So we get pictures of Hogmanay and Hallowe'en, of women wooed for money and the humbling of purse-proud lovers, of the tragi-comedy of childhood, as in Mr. Murray's "Whistle," of ungracious parents and brisk daughters, of amorous old ladies, of immortal annuitants, of easily beguiled husbands, of respectability, as in Fergusson's "Braid Claith," seen through the mocking eyes of the poet. I have omitted all the "Blythsome Bridals" and such-like, which are rather for the philologist than for the lover of poetry, and I have included nothing from the "flytings" and satires of the early masters, for they would be unintelligible in extracts.
====106
=There are older versions in Watson's collection (1711), which may be by Francis Sempill, and in the _Tea-Table Miscellany_, and various Jacobite copies; but, except for the chorus, they have no kinship with Burns's masterpiece, which, throughout the world, has become the song of re-united friends. I have heard it sung in Dutch on a Boer farm on the Swaziland border.
====107
=From "The Twa Dogs."
====108
=From "The Twa Dogs." This piece and the foregoing seem to me a far finer statement of human equality than robust rhetoric like "A man's a man for a' that."
====109
=The two first verses are in Herd (1776). Chambers is inclined to attribute the piece to the Rev. Dr. Strachan, the minister of Carnwath, in Lanarkshire, near which is the hill called Tinto, or Tintock. Tintock is celebrated in a local rhyme :-
"On Tintock tap there is a mist,
And in that mist there is a kist,
And in that kist there is a caup,
And in that caup there is a drap.
Take up the caup and drink the drap,
And set the caup on Tintock tap."
====110
=Carolina Oliphant (1766-1845), of the ancient Jacobite house of Gask, married the fifth Lord Nairne-a title which is now held by the Lansdowne family. She was, beyond question, the foremost poet among Scotswomen. "The Laird of Cockpen" is founded, like most of her lyrics, on an older song. The two stanzas, which Miss Ferrier, the author of _Marriage_, wrote to round off the tale, have been omitted.
====111
=From _Hamewith_, 1909.
====112
=For the customs connected with Hallowe'en-and Burns's poem is a treasury of curious folk-lore - see the note in Henley, I. 356-60.
====113
=This cheerful ditty, which goes to a most jovial tune, is much in request at Lowland kirns and country weddings. The work of Alexander Rodger (1784-1846) is to be found in that curious miscellany, _Whistle Binkie_, 1846, where, says Mr. Hepburn Millar, "the vernacular Muse appears at her very worst, oscillating between extravagant sentiment and intoxicated but cheerless mirth."
====114
=The best, I think, of Fergusson's pictures of the dirty, drunken, picturesque, and incurably snobbish Edinburgh of his day. He anticipates Burns in his mastery of the "Habbie Simson" stave.
====115
=From _Lyrics Legal and Miscellaneous_. First printed about 1851.
====116
=Child, No. 274. There are more versions than Professor Child prints, for I have seen at least four. The story is found in the popular literature of many countries, and there is an English ballad on the same subject, "The Merry Cuckold and the Kind Wife." The copy in the text is that which Herd printed in 1769. A later version, included in Ford's _Vagabond Songs and Ballads_, Second Series, page 61, gives the song a Jacobite complexion. The wife in the last verse confesses :-
"Oh, hooly, hooly, my gudeman,
=And dinna angry be;
It's but our cousin Macintosh
=Frae the North Countrie."
====118
=From Chambers's _Popular Rhymes of Scotland_, 1826. I have given the extended version which I used to hear as a child.
====119
=This is substantially the text which Chambers printed "from recitation" (_Scottish Songs_, II. 455), but I have given the queer song as I used to hear it in my youth in Tweeddale. Tam o' the Linn may be Tam Lin of the ballad, but he has grievously changed from the lover of the Queen of Elfland, and become a grotesque, the father of a family and the sport of circumstance. Joanna Baillie wrote a set of stirring verses, in which the old jingle is cleverly imitated - _Poetical Works_, 1851, page 821.
BOOK VIII
BACCHANALIA
=On this unedifying section there is need of little commentary. Claret was the old drink of gentlemen in Scotlaud, and ale, strong or otherwise, of the peasantry, and whisky came into general use in the Lowlands only towards the end of the eighteenth century. There are no better bottle songs than the three masterpieces of Burns, for they have philosophy as well as good fellowship, and there is a rich fescennine humour in those deplorable ditties, "Todlin' Hame" and "Hoolie and Fairly." The moralist may shake his head over "The Orgiasts," but Sir John Falstaff would have approved.
====120
=Written by Burns to celebrate a meeting at Moffat with Allan Masterton and William Nichol. In the pen-ultimate line "last" seems the better reading, and it is thus quoted in one letter of Burns, but on the whole the texts favour "first." There are suggestions in it of an old song referred to by Shakespeare, "Three Merry Men we be."
====121
=A parody of, and to be sung to the tune of, "Lumps o' Pudding."
====122
=From _Lyrics Legal and Miscellaneous_.
====123
=The refrain is old. The third verse was inscribed by Burns on a window-pane of the Globe Tavern at Dumfries.
====124
=An old song amended by Burns for Johnson's _Museum_, and printed in other versions by Cromek, Chambers, and Cunningham. I have given Cunningham's text, which is at least as good as Burns's. There is a verse from Cromek worth preserving :-
"I had forty shillings in a clout,
Gude ale gart me pyke them out.
That the gear shou'd moule I thought a sin;
Gude ale keeps my heart aboon."
====125
=A song which is not later in date than the seventeenth century. It was printed by Ramsay in the _Tea-Table Miscellany_. Burns thought it "the first bottle song that ever was composed."
====126
=The first four verses of the song prined under the title of "The Drucken Wife of Galloway" in Yair's _Charmer_ in 1751, and then amended for Johnson's _Museum_. In the ordinary version the erring dame is also a Jacobit, and behaves like the wife of the blacksmith of Cairnvreckan in _Waverley_. Joanna Baillie imitated it, _Poetical Works_, 1851, page 819.
====127
=(1) was first printed by Herd and then by Cunningham, whose version I give. Barbarous joy at the death of an unwanted wife is not unknown in Scottish literature. Compare Burns's-
"Bitter in dool, I licket my winnins
O' marrying Bess to gie her a slave;
Blest be the hour she cool'd in her linens,
And blyth be the bird that sings on her grave!"
(Henley, II. 67.)
=(2) from _Chambers's Popular Rhymes of Scotland_, 134. A tailor of Edinburgh, one Adam Crawford, wrote additonal verses, but the wild quatrain of tradition is enough for me.
=(3) was used by Burns as a verse of "My luve, she's but a lassie yet"; it is also a verse of a set of "Green grows the rashes O" in Herd, and, according to Henley, II. 241, is derived fromm a song in an old chap-book, the _Cowgate Garland_, in the Motherwell collection.
====128
=From _Lyrics Legal and Miscellaneous_.
BOOK IX
CHARACTERS
=This section, but for considerations of space, might have been greatly extended, for Scots poetry is ricj in racy portraiture. Happily, the best which I have omitted, such as Captain Grose and all the characters in "The Jolly Beggars," are easily accessible in Burns. There is much, too, in Dunbar which I should have liked to include, and in Sir David Lyndsay, and there is the admirable picture of the fifteenth-century _nouveau riche_ in "The Thrie Tales of the Thrie Priestis of Peblis," not to speak of the _genre_ pieces of Ramsay and Fergusson. As it is, I have tried to give a glimpse of the old world in Dunbar's "John Dog," in Maitland's "Thievis of Liddisdale," and Lyndsay's "Pardoner," as well as the good and bad of a later Scotland. But indeed all may be said to belong to the past; even Mr. Hamish Hendry's beadle and Mr. Carnie's auctioneer are figures of a bygone age; only Mr. Logie Robertson's inklers are still with us, and likely to remain.
====129
=Ed. Scottish Text Society, II. 195. James Dog, or Doig, was Queen Margaret's Wardrober.
====130
=Six verses out of fifteen. Sir Richard Maitland (1496-1586) was an eminent judge who fell blind at the age of sixty-five, after which he devoted himself to literature. His poems were published by the Maitland Club in 1830. His account of the Liddesdale reivers may be compared with thtat of Bshop Lesley, written about the same time: _Leslaeus de Origine, Moribus at Rebus Gestis Scotorum_ in Scott's _Border Antiquities_, Appendix VI.
====131
=One of the best characters in literatur of a country gentleman: "the ae best fellow e'er was born," and one, says Burns, "who held the patent for his honours immediatelyf rom Almighty God" (Henley, I. 262-8).
====132
=(1) first printed in Yair's _Charmer_, 1751. I ahve used the text given by Chambers.
=(2) is a fragment from _Lyrics Legal and Miscellaneous_.
====133
=From _The Thrie Estaitis_, Part I. The Middle Scots "makars" are unwearying in their gibes at the Highlands, and Celtic folk-lore is a ususal ingredient of their broader farce. Compare the spirited passage in "Ane Littell Interlud," which may or may not be Dunbar's (Ed. Scottish Text Society, II. 315) :-
"My foir grandsyre, hecht Fyn Mackcowll,
That dang the Devill and gart him yowll,
The skyis rain'd when he wald scowll,
=He trublit all the air;
He hat my gudesyre Gog Magog;
He when he dansit, the warld wald schog;
Ten thousand ellis wyde in his frog
=Of hieland plaids and mair.
And yet he was of tendir youth;
But eftir he grew meikle at fowth
Ellevin myle wyde was his mouth,
=His teeth was ten myle squair.
He wald upon hsi taes upstand,
And let the starnis doun with his hand,
And sett them in a gold garland
=Aboif hsi wifis hair."
====134
=This is Cunningham's version, II. 66. Scott in the _Minstrelsy_ prints only the first, second, and fourth stanzas. Yellow and green were the liveries of the house of Home. The Selkirk souters, according to tradition, headed by the town clerk, William Brydone, fought gallantly at Flodden, and perished almost to a man, whereas the family of Home was suspected of being half-hearted.
====135
=Sempill lived through the first half of the seventeenth century. "Habbie Simson" is the parent of a long family; Fergusson, Burns, and all the later vernacular poets adapted this stanza-an old Troubadour measure, popular in Scotland since hte fifteenth century.
====136
=_Burns from Heaven, with Some Other Poems, 1897.
====137
=William Carnie was born in 1824, and dies in 1908. Hirpletillem of the delectable name was a place close to Rubislaw Den, long since covered by the suburban villas of Aberdeen.
====138
=Seven stanzas omitted, which localize a satire that in essence is as universal as it is matchless and merciless.
====139
=_Horace in Homespun_-"A Wet Day : Hughie's Pity for the Tinklers." For "Poussie nancy" see Burns's "The Jolly Beggars."
BOOK X
LITERATURE
=The substance of this section is the theorizing of the poets about their art, their tributes to their predecessors, and that subtler form of tribute which consists in direct translation. Of the first there is nothing but Burns's robust confession of faith, for the poets, wisely, are shy of theory. Of the second, we have Dunbar's eulogy of his master, Chaucer, and his "Lament of the Makaris," and surely the noblest threnody in our literature on a singer's fellow-craftsman. It does nto belong to the class of great elegies, like the lament of Bion for Moschus, or "Lycidas," or "Adonais," or "Thyrsis," for the personal element is not predominant; it is rather a meditation on the fragitly of life and the tenuity of human hopes, to which, as illustration, enters a pageant of dead poets. It has a curious resemblance to a passage in Gabriel Harvey (not otherwise a poet) which begins-
"Ah, that Sir Humpry Gilbert should be dead."
In later Scots verse there is an abundance of these tributes. There is an especial plethora of apostrphes to Burns, and Burns himself has acclaimes his predecessors like Ramsay and Fergusson, but the thing was a mere literary convention, and frequently absurd. The worst is Ramsay's "Richy and Sandy," where in amoebean strain two shepherds of these names lament the death of one "Adie that play'd and sang sae sweet," and the reader is aghast at the discovery that the three are meant for Steele, Pope, and Addison!
=The translations are culled from a narrow field. The page of Virgil which Gawain Douglas gave "rude Scotland" was a very rude page, with nothing Virgilian about it, and Douglas's Scots only becomes a fit medium when dealing with the horrors of Avernus. The truth is that the delicitas of Scots in not curiosa, and demands in translation etiher a rugged or a homely original. My imitation of the Twenty-first Idyll of Theocritys was the result fo a suggestion of Andrew Lang; and there are other idylls, notably the Seventh, which might go reasonably well into the vernacular. Horace has to be paraphrased, not translated, whether by Mr. Charles Murray or "Hugh Haliburton"; but the Horatian philosophy accords well with one side of our temperament, and the Sabine farm is not ill represented by the Lowland cottage. The most natural subjec tof translation into Scots is the song written to be sung. Mr. gray has shown what can be done with heine, and there is much in Beranger and Victor Hugo which I should have through worth a Northern setting.
====140
=From "The Epistle to J. Lapraik," April 1, 1785.
====141
=From "The Epistle to William Simpson of Ochiltree," May 1785.
====142
=From "The Golden Targe," Ed. Scottish Text Society, II. 10.
====143
=Ed. Scottish Text Society, II. 48. This poem in the French kyrielle metre is to my mind quite the equal of Francois Villon's two _ballades_ on the same subject, on which it may have been modelled. Dunbar wrote it probably in 1507, when he was soem forty-seven years old, a stage of life which moves a man to reflection.
====144
=Henley, IV. 13-the two last verses omitted.
====145
=_Poems Scots and English_, 1917.
====146
=Gawain Douglas (1475-1522) was a son of old "Bell-the-Cat," Archibald, Earl of Angus. He issued his version of the _Aeneid_in 1513, the year of Flodden, and it was first printed (in London) in 1553. It is most pleasantly read in Ruddiman's folio of 1710.
====147
=_Hamewith_, 1909.
====148
=_Songs and Ballads, chiefly from Heine (Grant Richards, 1920). As to (2) the curious may note that Burns's _John Barleycorn_ begins with almost the same line.
BOOK XI
SPORT
=Sport in Scotland, as the word is generally understood, is a thing of modern growth. In old days the chase was limited int eh Lowlands to the hunting of the deer int he royal forests and over the lands of the greater nobles, and no one had occasion to sing of it except in the incidental stave of a ballad-
"Ettrick Forest is a fair forest,
=In it grows many a seemlie tree;
The hard, the hynd, the dae, the rae,
=And of a' wyld beastis great plentie."
For the romance of the "dun deer" we must go to Duncan Ban Macintye and the Gaelic poets, for it never came within the orbit of the vernacular. The shooting of game birds is a recent thing, depending on the development of the gun, and we can show nothing on it except a stanza or two of Burns in "Tam Samson's Elegy," and three verses int he "Elegy on Captain Matthew Henderson," where the wild things of lock and moor are summoned to lament their destroyer. If the poetry of a grouse drive, whent he birds come before an autumn gale like bullets, is ever put into words, I am assured that these words will not be Scots, for the thing is alien to the national tradition.
=It is curious that the two ancient games of curling and golf should not have found their bards. The first has only a chance verse of Burns, and the second had to wait till Andrew Lang. Games-even the "Roaring game"-and sports played, I fear, only a little part in our forefathers' lives, and never rose into the prominence which made them matter for the rhymer. Even poaching, a romantic trade enough, had to wait till our own day for its _vates sacer_ in Mr. Menzies. Fishing, which in England has had a literary atmosphere since Dame Juliana Berners, did not acquire one in Scotland till Scott's proce and the songs of Thomas Tod Stoddart and George Outram. So I will supplement my tiny collection with Med Dods's _apologia_, which every angler should have by heart, and a taste of Zachary Boyd's preposterous ichthyology. The first is from the opening chapter of _St. Ronan's Well_-Meg on the life of the fisherman :-
="Pawky auld carles, that kend whilk side their bread was buttered upon. . . . They were up in the morning-had their parritch, wi' maybe a thimblefull of brandy, and then awa' up into the hills; eat their bit cauld meat on the heather, and cam' hame at e'en wi' their creel full of caller trouts, and had them to their dinner, and their quiet cogue of ale, and their drap punch, and were set singing their catches and glees, as they ca'd them, till ten o'clock, and then to bed wi' God bless ye-and what for no?"
The second is from Boyd's "The English Academie," in MS. in the Library of Glasgow University :-
"Go's might so peopled hath the sea
=With fish of divers sort,
That men therein may clearly see
=Great things for their comfort.
There is such great varietie,
=Of fishes of all kind,
That it were great impietie
=God's hand there not to find.
The puffen Toreuse, and Thorneback,
=The Scillop and the Goujeon,
The Shrimpe, the Spit-fish, and the Sprat,
=The Stock-fish, and the Sturgeon;
The Toreuse, Tench, and Tunnyfish,
=The Sparling and the Trout;
And Herring, for the poor man's dish,
=Is all the land about;
The Groundling, Gilt-head, and the Crab,
=The Gurnard, Cockle, Oyster,
The Cramp-fish, and als the Sea-Dog,
=The Crefish and the Conger;
The Periwinkle and Twinfish-
=It's hard to count them all;
Some are for oyle, some for the disk;
=The greatest is the Whale!"
====149
=Henley, I. 221-2. Burns wrote : "When this worthy old sportsman went out last muir-fowl season, he supposed it was to be, in Ossian's phrase, "the last of his fields," and expressed an ardent wish to die and be buried in the muirs."
====150
=_Poetical Works_, 1923, I. 28.
====151
=_Angling Songs_, 1889.
====152
=_Poems Scots and English_, 1917.
====153
=I gave this little piscatorial eclogue as I heard it repeated in my youth. I have never seen it in print. The Kips are the Shielgreen Kips to the north-east of Peebles, which look down upon the head of Leithen Water.
====154
=_Provincial Sketches and Other Verses_, 1902.
====155
=_Poetical Works_, 1923, II. 69.
BOOK XII
NATURE
=Books have been written, such as Professor Veitch's, on the attitude of Scots poetry to nature, but I cannot find that it differs from that of poets in any other land. We have already seen the rhapsodies of the early "makars" in May-spiritual exultations rather than natural description, for they are more concerned with their own hearts than with the face of the earth, though Dunbar has a charming picture of a shallow stream at dawn, and Henryson in "The Swallow" describes with vivid realism the sights on a sping mroning in the fields around Dunfermline. For the rest we shall find little of the Wordsworthian metaphysic or the "pathetic fallacy"; the later writers reproduce a landscape or an atmosphere with extreme precision, and, as a rule, with complete objectivity. They are at their best in the pieces which deal with desolate scenes and wild weather, for the Scots tongue is rich in words for every mood of unfriendly nature. We see this in Gawain Douglas on a winter day, and in BUrns on a spate int he river Ayr-each phrase is exact and adequate. Throughout the Ballads, too, there is a perpetual echo of "wan water" and "the roaring of the sea" and "the gryming of a new-fae'en snaw." When storms are forgotten the Muse does nto dally in the common meadows of pastoral. She seeks recondite effects, as in Gawain Douglas's picture of a northern night in midsummer when the air is tremulous with dawn before the after-glow in the west has faded, or, as in the poems of J.B. Selkirk and Principal Shairp and the stanza from Stevenson, which aim at recapturing the far-away haunted peace of the Border hills.
=The half-dozen local rhymes are a small handful from a rich store. Scarcely a Scottish parish but has its own jungle. The trouble is that hese jungles, fascinating as they may be to the antiquarian, rarely approach the confines of literature.
====156
=Ed. Scottish Text Society, 25-33 - eleven stanzas omitted. Alexander Hume was of the Polwarth family, and lived during the second half of the sixteenth century. Unlike the head of the family, his branch took the side of the Reformers, and he spent his life as the minister of Logie. Some of the details of the "Day Estivall" may have been a memory of boyish days at Polwarth; but many are more French than English, for Hume was much in France in his youth. The "London beer" is pure Chaucer (Prologue to the _Canterbury Tales_, 382). Hume's _Hymnes or Sacred Songs wherein the Right Use of Poesie may be Espied_ was published in Edinburgh in 1599.
====157
=From _Hame Content: a Satire_.
====158
=From the Prologue to the _Eneados_, Book VII.
====159
=Henley, I. 204-5.
====160
=_Poems_ by J. B. Selkirk, collected edition, 1905. The author was James B. Brown, a tweed manufacturer of Selkirk, who also wrote English verse of much charm and technical accomplishment.
====161
=See Veitch's _History and Poetry of the Scottish Border_, II. 349-51. Shairp's verse is in _Kilmahoe, a Highland Pastoral_, 1864, and _Glen Desseray and Other Poems_, 1888.
====162
=From the Prologue to the XIII. Book of the _Eneados_. "He (Gawain Douglas) is not often quoted for his great discovery in a line or two of the thirteenth Prologue of _Eneados_, when he tells how he watched the midsummer midnight in the North, and finds not only the right word for what he sees, but the right word for his own poetry. . . . He sees a new thing in the life of the world--no poet that I know of (except Homer) had thought of it before-and in naming it he gives the interpretation also, the spirit of poetry: pleasance and half wonder." - W. P. Ker, _The Art of Poetry_, page 26.
====163
=From "The Counterblast," 1886. _Underwoods_, II. 8.
====164
=(1) is from Chambers's _Popular Rhymes of Scotlana_, 1826.
=(2) is in Child, _Fragments_, quoted from Finlay's _Scottish Ballads_, I. 32.
=(3) I owe to Mrs. Jacob, who heard it in Angus.
=(4) is still remembered in Tweeddale.
=(5) is from Chambers. Scott used it as a heading to chapter xxviii. of _Rob Roy_.
=(6) is preserved by Hume of Godscroft in his _History of the Houses of Douglas and Angus_ (Edinburgh, 1644). The reference is to the murder of William, sixth Earl of Douglas, in 1440, in Edinburgh Castle, when the black bull's head was put on the table.
BOOK XII
FRIENDLY BEASTS
=Country people, who spend their lives among animals, acquire a curious attitude towards the brute creation, speaking as if its members were reasoning creatures, highly individualized in character. The fact is apparent in all folk-lore. In Scotland the habit is most marked, and the best instance is the treatment by the shepherd of his dogs, as may be read in Hogg and Stevenson and Dr. John Brown. In the little world of a moorland parish birds and beasts are more than half the personages. The warmth and intimacy which attends the subject in Scots poetry come largely from the richness of the Scots language in kindly diminutives. The classic examples are Burns's auld mare Maggie and Mailie the ewe; he is less natural when in "The Mouse" he seeks deliberately a peg for moralizing. Pathos, indeed, is scarcely permissible in this sphere, except by an after-thought; the note should be sententious comedy, as in "The Louse" and "The Twa Dogs," or farcical comedy, as in "Robin Redbreast's Testament."
=This section may be found difficult by many readers, for the vernacular, when it treats of familiar beasts, is apt to run riot. But happily the sense of even obscure words may be often gathered from the sound.
====165
=First printed by Herd, 1769. The song is probably not later than 1621, the year when the bridge of Perth was destroyed by a great flood.
====166
=The closing stanzas of the ballad of "The Broomfield Hill," Child, No. 43. There are six versions; the one printed is that given in Scott's _Minstrelsy_.
====167
=Sung by Elspeth of the Craigburnfoot, _The Antiquary_, chapter xi.
====169
=In the absence of a treatise on old Scots veterinary lore, I find it impossible to identify the ailments and the points of this extraordinary mare. The song, on the strength of Allan Ramsay's "Elegy on Patie Birnie," is said to have been the work of Patrick Birnie, a fiddler of Kinghorn in Fife, who lived at the close of the seventeenth century. I have given the version in Chambers's _Scottish Songs_, I. 302. There are longer versions in Cunningham, III. 10, and in Ford's _Vagabond Songs and Ballads_, Second Series, I. 43, from the latter of which I take these verses :-
"The puir man's head's sair
Wi greetin' for his gude grey mare
He's like to die himsel' wi' care
=Aside the green kirkyaird.
He's thinkin' on the bygane days,
And a' her douce and canny ways,
And how his ain gude wife, auld Bess,
=Micht neist as weel been spared."
====171
=John Skinner (1721-1807) was Episcopal minister at Longside, Aberdeenshire, and the author of "Tullochgorum," that most rollicking and dance-compelling of measures. The piece is in Chambers, I. 219.
====172
=The refrain is old. Burns wrote the verse to fit a tune which was sung by an old woman at Mosspaul, where the road goes over from Ewesda1e to Teviot.
====174
=Burns found his model for this delightful threnody in "The Last Dying Words of Bonnie Heck; a famous greyhound in the shire of Fife," by William Hamilton of Gilbertfield (? 1665-1751), printed in Watson's _Choice Collection_, 1706.
====177
=From _Lyrics Legal and Miscellaneous_.
BOOK XIV
ENCHANTMENTS
=I first called this section "The Twilight World," but I dropped the title because of its manifest ineptness. It is all enchantments, but many of them belong to broad daylight. Burns's, for example; no hair will stir on the scalp because of Tam o Shanter's peril, and the poet's conception of the Accuser of the Brethren is not of a fallen angel, but of a humorous, uncomfortable house-goblin. Burns's clear, sharp vision and classic avoidance of indeterminate colours and ragged edges keep him from one special kind of magic; and the only instance I can recollect where he attains it is in the solitary line -
"The wan moon is setting behind the white wave."
William Nicholson had more of it in his Aiken Drum, who
"tirl'd na lang, but he glided ben
Wi a dreary, dreary hum;"
but unfortunately "The Brownie of Blednoch" tails off into the commonplace. So, too, many of the Ballads, and these not the least ancient, treat the unearthly in a comic spirit, or at any rate with a precision which has the effect of comedy. "The False Knight upon the Road," "The Wee, Wee Man,"" The Waters o' Wearie's Well," even "The Laily Worm" are enchantments for the full noontide. But with "Thomas the Rhymer" and "Tam Lin" we begin to hear the horns of Elfland; phrases and cadences "tease us out of thought" and lay a spell on the mind,-
="And they saw neither sun nor moon;
=But they heard the roaring of the sea."
==*=*=*=*=*
="For a' the blude that's shed on earth
=Rins thro' the springs in that countrie."
==*=*=*=*=*
="About the middle o' the night,
=She heard the bridles ring."
"The Daemon Lover" has it-
="I'll show where the white lilies grow
=On the banks o' Italie."
And in "The Wife of Usher's Well" we are in the pale light of the other world, when the sons come home-"their hats were o' the birk"-
="It neither grew in syke nor ditch,
==Nor yet in ony sheugh;
=But at the gates o' Paradise
==That birk grows fair eneugh."
=It is not easy to define this peculiar magic, but it is unmistakable and tremendous. You will find it in Keats, in "Kubla Khan," in an image of Shakespeare's, like that in _Hamlet_-
======="the fat weed
=That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf."
It is translunary, not of the earth, troubling the mind with a sense of powers beyond its ken, as if the monitors of the unseen whispered for a moment in the ear. In Scots verse it is found chiefly in the Ballads; the "bogillis and ghaistis" of the "makars" know it not. William Bell Scott came very near it in his "Witch's Ballad," and you will find it in a barbarous form in the receipt for the "witch cake," which Cromek printed in an appendix to his _Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song_. Parts of "Kilmeny" have the true glamour, but the "vile sixpenny planet" which beset James Hogg drove him to rhetoric and prolixity, and a single inept word can break its delicate spell. Sir Walter Scott at his greatest can compass it-in prose, as when the witchwives talk in the churchyard at the close of "The Bride of Lammermoor", and in verse, in "Proud Maisie." That catch sung by a crazy woman brings a sudden queer crooked shadow from the outer darkness over the brightness of youth and love.
====178
=Burns only told one tale in verse, but it is the best since Chaucer. For the topographical and traditional allusions, see the note in Henley, I. 433-41.
====180
=Child, No. 3. Motherwell discovered the ballad in Galloway, and printed it in his _Minstrelsy_, 1827. The idea is that the witch or wizard or devil will carry off the traveller who has no talent for repartee. What would Dickie o' Dryhope (see page 145) have done? "Peit" is the peat which school children in Scotland till our fathers' days had to bring each morning for the master's fire.
====181
=Child, No. 138-seven versions-first published by Herd in 1776. I have followed his text, except for the first and second lines in the last stanza, which are from Allan Cunningham's version.
====182
=Child, No. 4-nine versions. There is a ballad on this subject in almost every tongue in Europe.
====183
=Child, No. 37-five versions.
====184
=Child, No. 39-fifteen versions. The ballad is so ancient that it is mentioned among the tales told by the shepherds in the _Complaynt of Scotland_, 1549. I have used the text printed in Johnson's _Museum_, 1792, and communicated by Robert Burns. Scott's version in the _Minstrelsy_ has some additional verses. Miles Cross (Mary's Cross) is said to have once stood in what are now the grounds of Bowhill, and Carterhaugh is still the name of the meadow at the junction of Yarrow and Ettrick.
====185
=William Bell Scott (1811-90) was best known as an artist, but he published _Poems_, 1875, and dabbled in artistic and literary criticism. For the details of witchcraft in this poem-the mouse, etc.-the reader may consult Miss Margaret Murray's _The Witch-Cult in Western Europe_, 1921.
====186
=Child, No. 36. There is but the one version, which is found in a collection made by Skene of Rubislaw in the north of Scotland, and called by Scott "The Old Lady's Complete Set of Ballads." "It is pure tradition," says Child, "and has never been retouched by a pen." I have omitted the repetition of the first four verses in the middle of the ballad.
====187
=Child, No. 243-eight versions. The text I have printed is that given in the _Oxford Book of Ballads_, composed partly from the version in Scott's _Minstrelsu_, taken down by William Laidlaw, and partly from that of the Kinloch MSS. The English ballad on the same subject in the Pepys Collection has the unromantic title of "James Harris."
====188
=This is Allan Cunningham's re-telling (_Scottish Songs_, I. 329) of an old ballad tale, of which a version is given by Scott in the _Minstrelsy_, communicated by Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe. Cunningham follows the more charitable interpretation, a false nurse and a mother careless till too late. The piece is a variant of "The Cruel Mother" (Child, No. 20) :-
="She sat down below a thorn,
==_Fine flowers in the valley,_
=And there she has her sweet babe born-
==_And the green leaves they grow rarely._
='Smile na sae sweet, my bonny babe,
=An' ye smile sae sweet, ye'll smile me dead.'
=She's ta'en out her little penknife
=And twin'd the sweet babe o' its life.
=She's howkit a grave by the light of the mune,
=And there she's buried her sweet babe in.
=As she was going to the church
=She saw her sweet babe in the porch.
='Oh, sweet babe, an' you were mine,
=I wad cleed you in the silk sae fine.'
='Oh, mother dear, when I was thine,
=Ye didna prove to me sae kind.'"
====189
=Child, No. 79-four versions. The text is that of Scott's _Minstrelsy_, taken down from the recitation of an old woman in West Lothian.
====190
="Kilmeny" appeared first in _The Queen's Wake_, 1813, the tale told by "Drummond from the moors of Ern." The affected archaic spelling has been modernized. The opening and the close are the best things which Hogg ever wrote. All that comes between seems to me to be a long, dull, elaborate blunder, and I have omitted it,
====191
=From _The Heart of Midlothian_, chapter xi. (Madge Wildfire's dying song),
BOOK XV
LACRIMAE RERUM
=There is regret in other sections of this book-regret for departed love, for lost causes and kings, and above all the secular plaint for the dead. Here I confine the mood to that vaguer melancholy which is expressed by the Virgilian phrase, the indefinite sorrow for the "wrongs that time procureth" of which Minstrel Burne sang, the regret for vanished days, for friends scattered, for old ways forsaken. I have included "The Flowers of the Forest," which is far more than a lament for a lost battle; it is less the fallen that the singer weeps than the happy pastoral life which has been shattered. Stevenson and Mr. Wingate speak of the loosening of friendship, not in tragic cataclysm but in the common processes of life. In "Durisdeer" and "Ettrick" the place remains while the human accompaniment is gone; in others the place is lost, though the human ties may not be broken. It is in these last that the vernacular genius shines most brightly, for the passionate love of one corner of the earth is deep in the Scots character, and the text in Jeremiah is part of its confession of faith: "Weep not for the dead, neither bemoan him; but weep sore for him that goeth away, for he shall return no more, nor see his native country." Sometimes the exile is in a far land, the "Irish shore" or "foreign France," but it may only be England, as in "The Wild Geese," or even the next parish, as in "Lucy's Flittin'." It is not length of space that severs, but the changed orbit of the mind, and "Craigo Woods" is a longing for return less to a terrestrial spot than to a forgotten peace of the soul. The simplest expression of this passion of wistfulness is the best; and I wonder if others will be haunted, as I have been, by the four bare lines of "Lammermuir."
====192
=First published in _The Scottish Chap-book_,
====193
=Jean Elliot (1727-1803) was the second daughter of Sir Gilbert Elliot, second baronet of Minto, and the aunt of the first earl. Scott printed the poem in the _Minstrelsy_, together with another song (in English) on Flodden by Alison Rutherford of Fairnilee (Mrs. Cockburn), which first appeared in _The Lark_, 1765. The story of Miss Elliot's composition will be found in Veitch's _History and Poetry of the Scottish Border_, II. 264, and the details of her life in _The Border Elliots_ (1897), 454. The opening line and the refrain are traditional, and, with the tune, probably date from the time of Flodden.
====194
=This beautiful song was put together by Burns from a medley of old black-letter and broadside copies, and out of doggerel he produced immortal poetry. See the note on its antecedents in Henley, III. 433. Sir Walter Scott has used the same refrain-indeed, almost the whole of the third verse-in a song in _Rokeby_, probably working from the same originals.
====195
=_Songs and Verses_ by Lady John Scott, 1904-last stanza omitted.
====196
=Published first in the _Book of the Glasgow Ballad Club_, 1898.
====197
=_Songs and Verses_ by Lady John Scott, 1904.
====198
=This quatrain, which is traditional, is made the first stanza of Lady John Scott's "A Lammermuir Lilt," in her _Songs and Verses_.
====199
=William Forsyth (1818-79) was an Aberdeen journalist who published _Idylls and Lyrics_ in 1872. The lament is on the same theme as "The Canadian Boat Song," though here it is deer and not sheep that the "degenerate lord" boasts of. I have omitted two verses.
====200
=William Laidlaw (1780-1853), the son of the farmer of Blackhouse in Yarrow, was the friend and amanuensis of Sir Walter Scott see Veitch's _History and Poetry of the Scottish Border_, II. 321. The charm of the piece lies in its extreme naturalness and simplicity; James Hogg, on his own account, added eight more lines, which are neither natural nor simple, and which accordingly I have omitted.
====201
=_Songs of Angus_, 1915.
====202
=_Underwoods_, Book II. 16.
====203
=_Songs of Angus_, 1915.
====204
=_Poems_, 1919.
=====205
=_Underwoods_, Book II. 4.
BOOK XVI
PHILOSOPHY
=Philosophy is, perhaps, too large a word for the homely contents of this section. Here is no prying into the causes of things, but the eternal commonplaces of the conduct of life, as old as the Book of Job, and as young as the youngest poet among us, for each generation must discover and re-state them for itself. It is the gnomic wisdom of the ancients, translated into the language of everyday, and made immortal by the skill of the translator. I have set first Burns's credo of the many-sided man with a talent for diverse enjoyment, and next his classic plea that the source of joy must be sought in the heart. For each stage in life there is an appropriate pleasure, and some comfort attends every state, as Metrodorus sang in the Greek Anthology in reply to the pessimism of Posidippus. The young man is bidden rejoice in the days of his youth :-
="Quhen fair Flora, the goddess of the flowris,
==Baith firth and feildis freschely had ourfret,
=And perly droppis of the balmy schowris,
==Thir woddis grene had with thair watter wet;
==Musand allone in mornyng myld, I met
=A mirry man, that all of mirth cowth mene,
==Syngand the sang that richt sweitly wes sett,
=='O yowth be glaid in to thy flowris grene!'"
But Henryson antiphonally presents the view of age, "Oh, youth, thy flowris faidis ferly sone," and indeed the shadow of eld is on all the "makars," and they are eager, as if to convince their doubting hearts, to insist on its consolations. You will find it in Dunbar, in the anonymous "Welcum to Eild" in the Maitland MS., and very whimsically in Sir Richard Maitland's "Solace in Age" :-
="When young men cumis fra the grene
=(Playand at the fute-ball had bene),
==With brokin spald,
=I thank my God I want my ene,
==And am sa ald."
Then there is the plea for "leesome merriness," the singing heart, as the best gift of the pilgrim; Maitland gives it us, and Dunbar very nobly, and both had known vicissitudes. We have Mr. Logie Robertson's version of "_Non semper imbres_," and Dunbar's solemn converse, a warning of the transience of earthly joys as well as of earthly pain.
=The last three pieces carry us nearer metaphysic, with Stevenson's reflections upon the inequality of human lots as he lies warm in bed listening to the storm, and his haunting interrogatories in "The Spaewife." These last are the questions of a soul upon whom the shadows have fallen, and make a curious contrast to the joyous speculations of youth as found in "Hallo my Fancy," the song of that strange Covenanter, William Cleland, who died with his Cameronians at Dunkeld. I close with George Macdonald's answer to the riddle, hidden in the thoughts of the old folk, which the old folk never tell.
====206
=The last verse of "Corn Rigs" (Henley, I. 181). Burns is fond of these swift panoramas of a varied experience, as, for example :-
="Oh, merry hae I been teethin' a heckle,
==And merry ha' I been shapin' a spoon!
=Oh, merry hae I been cloutin' a kettle,
==An' kissin' my Katie when a' was done.
and
=I've been at drucken Writers' feasts,
=Nay, been bitch-fou 'mang godly Priests-
==Wi' rev'rencc be it spoken!-
=I've often join'd the honour'd jorum
=When mighty Squireships o' the Quorum
==Their hydra dreuth did sloken."
====207
=From "The Epistle to Davie, a Brother Poet" (Henley, I. 119-20), written, Burns tells us, in the metre of Montgomerie's _The Cherrie and the Slae_.
====208
=For Maitland, see note on page 495. Besides being the collector of the Maitland MSS. now in the Pepysian Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge, he himself wrote a number of poems which were published by the Maitland Club in 1830.
====209
=Ed. Scottish Text Society, II. 108. This specimen of Horatian philosophy has many parallels in Scots poetry, from Sir David Lyndsay's "Sum griedie fuill dois fill ane box, Ane uther fuill cummis and breaks the lox," etc. (_Ane Satyre_, II. 448), to Burns's "The owrecome only fashes folk to keep."
====210
=_Horace in Homespun_-"Hughie sings to console a brother shepherd."
====211
=Ed. Scottish Text Society, II. 110.
====212
=Ed. Scottish Text Society, II. 76.
====213
=_Underwoods_, Book II. 13.
====214
=_Underwoods_, Book II. 6.
====215
=_Poetical Works_, II. 1893.
BOOK XVII
DEATH
=The poetry of mortality in all ages and countries tends to fall into two moods: one which protests and laments, and one which welcomes, waiting, as Bacon says, "upon the shore of death." It is at its best, perhaps, when it draws no moral, but records the fact in all its grimness in the noble bare manner of the Ballads. There is no easy consolation in the "Lykewake Dirge," in "Edward," or "The Twa Corbies," or "Lord Randal"; there is not even the cry of regret; the thing is taken as if it were as natural and inevitable as the falling of night. But in most of the pieces there is the voice of lament and passionate longing. The poet mourns the loss of a brilliant figure from the world, the Lord of Aubigny or the Bonnie Earl of Moray; the lover his dead mistress, slain for his sake on Kirkconnel Lee; the girl her sweetheart drowned in Yarrow or in the salt sea, or dead at her chamber door; the widow of the Border reiver, her husband, whose sheet she has sewn and whose grave she has dug; the shepherd's wife a household left empty in the "fa' o' the year"; and the dead in Flanders speak to each other, and ask why they are under the sod. The defiance of death as in "Macpherson's Farewell" is rare; there is a sense of aidws which forbids the poet to speak slightingly of the great enemy. The mood of consolation and expectation, too, is not common in the best Scots verse, though sadly familiar in the jingles of conventional piety. But we find it in "Kirkbride," the only poem of a high order which the Covenant inspired, where to the dying Covenanter the grave is as a bride-chamber; and "The Land o' the Leal," too deeply enshrined in Scots hearts to permit of criticism, has the same confident hope. There is at any rate acquiescence in "The Last o' the Tinkler"; and the musing of Mr. Wingate and Allan Cunningham upon the true season for death has something of the spirit of Sir William Temple's famous sentence : "When all is done, human life is, at the greatest and the best, but like a froward child that must be played with and humoured a little to keep it quiet, till it falls asleep, and then the care is over." It was left for Alexander Hume, about the same time as Sir Walter Raleigh and in like words, to call death happy and kindly.
====216
=From Scott's _Minstrelsy_-a dirge of the Borders, but of which side of them who shall say? Scott's note is :-
="This is a sort of charm, sung by the lower ranks of Roman Catholics in some parts of the north of England while watching a dead body previous to interment. The tune is doleful and monotonous, and, joined to the mysterious import of the words, has a solemn effect. The word 'sleet' in the charm seems to be corrupted from 'selt' or salt, a quantity of which, in compliance with the pepular superstition, is frequently placed on the breast of a corpse."
====217
=Child, No. 13-three versions. First printed in Percy's _Reliques_, communicated by Sir David Dalrymple (Lord Hailes), the friend and correspondent of Dr. Johnson.
====218
=Child, No. 26. From Scott's _Minstrelsy_, communicated from "recitation" by C. K. Sharpe. There is an English version, "The Three Ravens," first printed in 1611.
====219
=Child, No. 12-twenty-five versions. I give the short version from Scott's _Minstrelsy_, which seems to be the best. In the longer texts there are a number of bequests similar to those in the "Edward" ballad. When sung to children, the young man of this eerie ballad became a child poisoned by a cruel stepmother; hence we get "The Bonnie Wee Croodlin' Doo," which I quote in the version of the Motherwell MS. :-
"'Oh, whare hae ye been all day, my bonnie wee croodlin' doo?
Oh, whare hae ye been all day, my bonnie wee croodlin' doo?'
'I've been at my stepmother's; oh, mak' my bed, mammie, noo!
I've been at my stepmother's; oh, mak' my bed, mammie, noo!'
'Oh, what did ye get at your stepmother's, my bonnie wee croodlin' doo?'
'I gat a wee, wee fishie; oh, mak' my bed, mammie, noo!'
'Where gat she the wee fishie, my bonnie wee croodlin' doo?'
'In a dub before the door; oh, mak' my bed, mammie, noo!'
'What did she wi' the wee fishie, my bonnie wee croodlin' doo?'
'She boiled it in a wee pannie; oh, mak' my bed, mammie, noo!"
Wha gied ye the banes o' the fishie till, my bonnie wee croodlin' doo?'
'I gied them till a wee doggie; oh, mak' my bed, mammie, noo!'
'Oh, whare is the little wee doggie, my bonnie wee croodlin' doo?'
Oh, whare is the little wee doggie, my bonnie wee croodlin' doo?'
'It shot out its fit and died, and sae maun I die too:
Oh, mak' my bed, mammie, noo; oh, mak' my bed, mammie, noo.'"
====220
=From the ballad, "Edom o' Gordon," Child, No. 178-nine versions. I have followed the text used by Percy in the _Reliques_ from a copy taken down by Lord Hailes from the recitation of a lady, and printed by Foulis in Glasgow in 1755.
====221
=Child, No. 210-four versions. From Smith's _Scottish Minstrelsy_, V. 42.
====222
=Ed. Scottish Text Society, II. 63-the last two stanzas. Bernard Stewart was the grandson of John Stewart of Darnley, and came in 1484 to Scotland as the ambassador of France to renew the ancient league. In 1485 he led the French auxiliaries who fought for Henry VII. at the battle of Bosworth. He was Captain of the Scots Guards in France, and won great glory in the war with Spain, so that Brantôme ranked him among the most illustrious of French captains. He died in Edinburgh in 1508 of an old fever contracted in Calabria. When he was compelled to surrender at Angertola he made it one of the terms that all of his company except himself should be set at liberty. "He sharply reproved," says the chronicler, "two young lords, his kinsmen, for that more faintly than was fit for men-_namely, for their being Scotsmen and of the blood royal_-they did bewail the unfortunate success of the war."
====223
=From Scott's _Minstrelsy_-the best of many versions.
====224
=Child, No. 181-two versions. The one in the text appeared in the _Tea-Table Miscellany_. James Stewart of Doune became Earl of Moray by his marriage with the eldest daughter of the Regent. He was murdered near his house of Donibristle in Fife in February 1592 by the Earl of Huntly, who sheltered himself behind the King's command to apprehend Moray, since the latter was supposed to be in communication with Bothwell. Sir James Balfour mentions a rumour that "the Queen, more rashly than wisely, some few days before, had commended Moray in the King's hearing, with too many epithets of a proper and gallant man."
====225
=From Herd, 1769. Another curious and beautiful verse is given by Chambers, I. 178 :-
"New Holland is a barren place, in it there grows nae grain
Nor ony habitation wherein for to remain;
But the sugar canes are plenty, and the wine draps frae the tree;
But the Lowlands of Holland hae twined my love and me."
====226
=This ballad, first printed in Scott's _Minstrelsy_, is associated by local tradition with the old tower of Henderland at the foot of Meggel, near St. Mary's Loch; but the Piers Cockburn whose story is in Pitcairn's _Criminal Trials_ was executed, not at his house door, but in Edinburgh in 1540 (see Veitch's _History and Poetry of the Scottish Border_, II. 18-20, and the note in Chambers, I. 175). Professor Veitch is right, I think, in saying that "lily" in the second line means merely pale yellow. The lily known to the Borders was the daffodil, and the colour of the bent, as in "lily lee" and "lily leven," is often like that of a pale daffodil.
====227
=Child, No. 2,015-eight versions. I have printed the shortest, and to my mind by far the most beautiful. It appeared in Ramsay's _Tea-Table Miscellany_ and _Orpheus Caledonius_.
====228
=Child, No. 201. The story relates to the visit of the plague to Perth in 1645.
====230
=_Poems, Songs, and Sonnets_, 1894. The district is Upper Nithsdale, where an old man on his deathbed said, "Bury me in Kirkbride, for there is much of God's redeemed dust lies there."
====232
=Thomas Smibert (1810-54), published _Io Anche : Poems chiefly Lyrical_, 1851.
====233
=_More Songs of Angus, and Others_, 1918.
====234
=_Ballads of Battle_, 1916.
====235
=(1) The first is from _Poems_, 1919.
=(2) The second is a verse of a song by Allan Cunningham in _Songs of Scotland_, IV. 358.
====236
=_Poetical Works_, 1893, Vol. II.
====238
=Ed. Scottish Text Society, 34. A stanza from the poem, "To his sorrofull Saull, Consolatioun."
BOOK XVIII
DIVINE PHILOSOPHY
=Scotland has a name for piety, but the repute has been won since the Reformation. In her Catholic days she was as a nation often at enmity with Rome and little troubled by it: the Borders lay for long seasons under the Papal ban, and cared for it not at all. A piece like "The Thrie Tales of the Thrie Priestis of Peblis," which belongs to the late fifteenth century, gives indeed a pleasant picture of the Church, but in things ecclesiastical satire, even in those orthodox times, was commoner than praise. Yet it is to the pre-Reformation poets that we must look for the great Scots devotional poetry, perhaps for the reason that, when the vernacular went out of fashion among the learned, it acquired a tavern atmosphere which made it ill-suited for such high purposes. Henryson and Dunbar are still at the head of our religious poets. Next to them must stand the early Reformers, who set themselves to adapt the love-lays and hunting songs of the people to the uses of piety. _The Gude and Godlie Ballats_ are often ridiculous in the extreme, but they have moments of wistfulness and passion and a strange solemnity. With Alexander Hume, the minister of Logie, the great age of Scots devotional poetry comes to an end.
=The seventeenth century, when the divines ran riot, produced only prose. The pity is the greater, for it had the stuff of poetry. There was a George Herbert in Bishop Leighton, whose sermons were admired by Coleridge; there was a Quarles, perhaps, in Samuel Rutherford, whose amorous divinity can be sufficiently revolting-Patrick Walker says that his _Letters_ were the companion of young rakes in their drinking bouts-but who has passages of tenderness and beauty. There was a Thomas Traherne, or somebody like him, in Mr. William Guthrie, who bade his hearers praise God "if you have no more, for this good day and sunshine to the lambs." Their language was English, and it may be questioned if they were not too far from the common speech to handle it in poetry, even if they had had the gift. Zachary Boyd, who preached against Cromwell and was punished by being invited to dinner, in his _Last Battell of the Soule in Death_ can write prose which recalls Fuller and Bunyan, but when it comes to versifying the Scriptures, more especially when he descends to a homely idiom, he is merely grotesque.
=In the eighteenth century English was so universal that it might have been made the official language of devotion by a decree of the General Assembly. The metrical version of the Psalms in use to-day is the work of a Provost of Eton; that fine collection, the Paraphrases, is English; and Scotland's few respectable contributions to hymnology have been in the same tongue. It is not surprising, perhaps, that the great body of Scots popular verse on which Burns worked should have contained no religious verse, for popular devotional poetry takes usually the form of carols and cradle songs, which took flight, if they ever existed, at the Reformation. But it is a sign of the groove into which the vernacular has sunk that no Scot since Hume has applied it to this purpose. Perhaps the instinct was right. Words and cadences associated with love-making and drinking would have been apt to raise undevout reminiscences, like the prayer of the minister which began with a line from "Tam o' Shanter," "Kings may be blest, O Lord, but Thou art glorious." When in the last century the Rev. Mr. Hately Waddell turned the Psalms into Scots the result did not make for edification.
=My selection is, therefore, with the exception of one poem by George Macdonald, wholly from the writers who lived before the seventeenth century. It begins with Dunbar's great Christmas ode and his "Ballad of Our Lady," into which he poured all the exuberance of his diction and the magnificence of his fancy. It includes two extracts from _The Gude and Godlie Ballats_, cries of distressed souls which seem to me to have something of a ballad poignancy. Then comes the gentle Henryson's version of Ecclesiastes, and last, Dunbar's noble conclusion of the whole matter. This anthology began with Dunbar in the fervour of spring and youth, and it closes with him singing as before of May and Aurora-but with the solemn voice and the grave eyes of one who has kept watch over man's mortality.
====239
=Ed. Scottish Text Society, II. 72. The first line is Isaiah xiv. 8, "Drop down ye heavens from above"-the verse for Vespers in Advent.
====240
=From _The Gude and Godlie Ballats_, Laing's edition, 192-two verses omitted.
====241
=Ed. Scottish Text Society, II. 269. Dunbar's masterpiece in internal rhyming.
====242
=_Poetical Works_, 1893, Vol. II.
====243
=From _The Gude and Godly Ballats_, Laing's edition, 116-seven verses out of twenty-two. The air is in Queen Elizabeth's _Virginal Book_.
====244
=From the Bannatyne MS.
====245
=Ed. Scottish Text Society, II. 174.