of the ballad, and only tranquillised by finding a lady of rank who
remembered hearing in her infancy the verses which have here been
quoted. He felt compelled, he tells us, 'to believe that the author of
_Hardyknute_ copied from the old ballad, if the coincidence be not
altogether accidental.' Finally, the young prince's procedure in
storming the castle, is precisely that of Gil Morrice in gaining access
to that of Lord Barnard:
And when he cam to Barnard's yett,
He would neither chap nor ca',
But set his bent bow to his breast,
And lightly lap the wa'.
It may fairly be said that, in ordinary literature, coincidences like
this are never 'accidental.' It may be observed, much of the narration
in _Fause Foodrage_ is in a stiff and somewhat hard style, recalling
_Hardyknute_. It was probably one of the earlier compositions of its
author.
The _Lass o' Lochryan_ describes the hapless voyage of a maiden mother
in search of her love Gregory. In the particulars of sea-faring and the
description of the vessel, _Sir Patrick Spence_ is strongly recalled.
She has garred build a bonny ship;
It's a' covered o'er wi' pearl;
And at every needle-tack was in't
There hung a siller bell.
Let the reader revert to the description of the bier prepared for the
seeming dead lady in the _Gay Gos-hawk_.
She had na sailed a league but twa,
Or scantly had she three,
Till she met wi' a rude rover,
Was sailing on the sea.
The reader will remark in _Sir Patrick_:
They had na sailed a league, a league,
A league but barely three, &c.
The rover asks:
'Now, whether are ye the queen hersel,
Or ane o' her Maries three,
Or are ye the Lass o' Lochryan,
Seeking love Gregory?'[20]
[20] The above three verses are in the version printed in
Lawrie and Symington's collection, 1791.
The queen's Maries are also introduced in _Mary Hamilton_, who, indeed,
is represented as one of them:
Yestreen the queen she had four Maries;
The night, she has but three;
There was Mary Seton and Mary Beaton,
And Mary Carmichael and me.
On arriving at love Gregory's castle, beside the sea, the lady calls:
'Oh, open the door, love Gregory;
Oh, open and let me in;
For the wind blaws through my yellow hair,
And the rain draps o'er my chin.'
He being in a dead sleep, his mother answers for him, and turns from
the door the forlorn applicant, who then exclaims:
'Tak down, tak down the mast o' gowd;
Set up a mast o' tree;
It disna become a forsaken lady
To sail sae royallie.
'Tak down, tak down the sails o' silk;
Set up the sails o' skin;
Ill sets the outside to be gay,
When there's sic grief within.'
Gregory then awakes:
O quickly, quickly raise he up,
And fast ran to the strand,
And there he saw her, fair Annie,
Was sailing frae the land.
* * *
The wind blew loud, the sea grew rough,
And dashed the boat on shore;
Fair Annie floated on the faem,
But the babie raise no more.
* * *
And first he kissed her cherry cheek,
And syne he kissed her chin;
And syne he kissed her rosy lips--
There was nae breath within.
The resemblance of these verses to several of the preceding
ballads,[21] and particularly to _Sir Patrick Spence_, and their
superiority in delicacy of feeling and in diction to all ordinary
ballad poetry, is very striking. It chances that there is here, as in
_Sir Patrick_, one word peculiarly _detective_--namely, strand, as
meaning the shore. In the Scottish language, strand means a rivulet, or
a street-gutter--never the margin of the sea.
[21] A passage in _Hardyknute_ maybe quoted as bearing a
marked resemblance to one of the above verses:
Take aff, take aff his costly jupe,
Of gold well was it twined, &c.
There is a considerable number of other ballads which are scarcely less
liable to suspicion as modern compositions, and which are all marked
more or less by the peculiarities seen in the above group. Several of
them are based, like the one just noticed, on irregular love, which
they commonly treat with little reproach, and usually with a romantic
tenderness. _Willie and May Margaret_[22] describes a young lover
crossing the Clyde in a flood to see his mistress, and as denied access
by her mother in a feigned voice, after which he is drowned in
recrossing the river; the ballad being thus a kind of counterpart of
the _Lass of Lochryan_. In _Young Huntin_, otherwise called _Earl
Richard_, the hero is killed in his mistress's bower through jealousy,
and we have then a verse of wonderful power--such as no rustic and
unlettered bard ever wrote, or ever will write:
[22] Called, in Professor Aytoun's collection, _The Mother's
Malison_; and in Mr Buchan's, _The Drowned Lovers_.
'O slowly, slowly wanes the night,
And slowly daws the day:
There is a dead man in my bower,
I wish he were away.'
One called _Fair Annie_ relates how a mistress won upon her lover, and
finally gained him as a husband, by patience, under the trial of seeing
a new bride brought home.[23] In the latter, the behaviour of the
patient mistress is thus described:
[23] A ballad named _Burd Ellen_, resembling _Fair Annie_ in
the general cast of the story, is a Scottish modification of
the ballad of _Child Waters_, published by Percy, from his
folio manuscript, 'with some corrections.' It probably came
through the same mill as _Gil Morrice_, though with less
change--a conjecture rendered the more probable, for reasons
to be seen afterwards, from its having been obtained by Mr
Jamieson from Mrs Brown of Falkland.
O she has served the lang tables
Wi' the white bread and the wine;
And aye she drank the wan water,
To keep her colour fine.
The expression, the wan water, occurs in several of this group of
ballads. Thus, in _Johnie of Bradislee_:
Is there ever a bird in this hale forest
Will do as mickle for me,
As dip its wing in the wan water,
And straik it o'er my ee-bree?
And in the _Douglas Tragedy_:
O they rade on, and on they rade,
And a' by the light o' the moon,
Until they cam to yon wan water,
And there they lighted down.
See further in _Young Huntin_:
And they hae ridden along, along,
All the long summer's tide,
Until they came to the wan water,
The deepest place in Clyde.
The circumstance is very suspicious, for we find this phrase in no
other ballads.
In _Clerk Saunders_, the hero is slain in his mistress's bower, by the
rage of one of her seven brothers, whose act is described in precisely
the same terms as the slaughter of _Gil Morrice_ by the bold baron:
He's ta'en out his trusty brand,
And straikt it on the strae,
And through and through Clerk Saunders' side
He's gart it come and gae.[24]
_Sweet William's Ghost_, a fine superstitious ballad, first published
in Ramsay's _Tea-table Miscellany_, 1724, is important as the earliest
printed of all the Scottish ballads after the admittedly modern
_Hardyknute_:
There came a ghost to Margaret's door,
With many a grievous groan;
And aye he tirled at the pin,
But answer made she none.
* * *
'O sweet Margaret! O dear Margaret!
I pray thee, speak to me;
Give me my faith and troth, Margaret,
As I gave it to thee.'
'Thy faith and troth thou 's never get,
Nor yet will I thee lend,
Till that thou come within my bower,
And kiss my cheek and chin.'[25]
'If I should come within thy bower,
I am no earthly man;
And should I kiss thy rosy lips,
Thy days will not be lang.
* * *
'My bones are buried in yon kirk-yard,
Afar beyond the sea;
And it is but my spirit, Margaret,
That's now speaking to thee.'
She stretched out her lily hand,
And for to do her best,
'Ha'e there's your faith and troth, Willie;
God send your soul good rest.'
Now she has kilted her robes of green
A piece below her knee,
And a' the live-lang winter night,
The dead corp followed she.
'Is there any room at your head, Willie,
Or any room at your feet?
Or any room at your side, Willie,
Wherein that I may creep?'
'There's no room at my head, Margaret;
There's no room at my feet;
There's no room at my side, Margaret;
My coffin's made so meet.'[26]
Then up and crew the red, red cock,
And up then crew the gray,
''Tis time, 'tis time, my dear Margaret,
That you were going away.'
* * *
[24]
Now he has ta'en his trusty brand,
And slait it on the strae,
And through Gil Morrice's fair bodie
He garred cauld iron gae.--_Gil Morrice._
[25]
And first he kissed her cherry cheek,
And syne he kissed her chin;
And syne he kissed her rosy lips--
There was nae breath within.--_Lass o' Lochryan._
To kiss cheek and chin in succession is very peculiar; and it
is by such peculiar ideas that identity of authorship is
indicated.
[26] That is, so exactly measured.
So far, the ballad appears as composed in the style of those already
noticed--a style at once simple and poetical--neither shewing the
rudeness of the common peasant's ballad, nor the formal refinement of
the modern English poet. But next follow two stanzas, which manifestly
have been patched on by some contemporary of Ramsay:
No more the ghost to Margaret said,
But with a grievous groan
Evanished in a cloud of mist,
And left her all alone, &c.
No such conclusion, perhaps, was needed, for it may be suspected that
the verse here printed _sixth_ is the true _finale_ of the story,
accidentally transferred from its proper place.
There is a slight affinity between the above and a ballad entitled _Tam
Lane_, to which Scott drew special attention in his _Border Minstrelsy_,
by making it a peg for eighty pages of prose dissertation _On the
Fairies of Popular Superstition_. It describes a lover as lost to his
mistress, by being reft away into fairy-land, and as recovered by an
effort of courage and presence of mind on her part. It opens thus:
O I forbid ye maidens a',
That wear gowd in your hair,
To come or gae by Carterhaugh,
For the young Tam Lane is there.
It may be remarked how often before we have seen maidens described as
wearing gold in their hair. One maiden defies the prohibition:
Janet has kilted her green kirtle
A little aboon her knee,
And she has braided her yellow hair
A little aboon her bree.
This, it will be observed, is all but the very same description applied
to Margaret in the preceding ballad. The narrative goes on:
She had na pu'd a red, red rose,
A rose but barely three,
Till up and starts a wee, wee man
At Lady Janet's knee.
Remember Sir Patrick's voyage:
They had na sailed a league, a league,
A league but barely three.
Let it also here be noted that the eldern knight in that ballad sits
'at the king's knee,' and the nurse in _Gil Morrice_ is not very
necessarily described as having 'the bairn upon her knee.' Why the knee
on these occasions, if not a habitual idea of one poet?[27]
[27] In _Childe Maurice_, in Percy's folio manuscript, the
hero says:
'... come hither, thou little foot-page,
That runneth lowly by my knee.'
The author of _Sir Patrick Spence_, and the other ballads in
question, might have known this version, and from it caught
this expression.
The consequences of the visit having been fatal to Lady Janet's health
and peace, she goes back to see her elfin lover, Tam Lane, who
instructs her how to recover him from his bondage to the queen of
fairy-land.
'The night it is good Halloween,
When fairy folk will ride;
And they that wad their true love win,
At Miles Cross they maun bide.'
'But how shall I thee ken, Tam Lane,
Or how shall I thee knaw,
Amang so many unearthly knights,
The like I never saw?'
'The first company that passes by,
Say na, and let them gae;
The next company that passes by,
Say na, and do right sae;
The third company that passes by,
Then I'll be ane o' thae.
'First let pass the black, Janet,
And syne let pass the brown;
But grip ye to the milk-white steed,
And pu' the rider down.'
Compare the first two of these stanzas with the queries put by the gay
gos-hawk to his master:
'But how shall I your true love find,
Or how suld I her know?
I bear a tongue ne'er wi' her spoke,
An eye that ne'er her saw.'
'O weel sall ye my true love ken,
Sae sore as ye her see,' &c.
As to the latter three stanzas, they exhibit a formula of description,
which appears in several of the suspected ballads, consisting of a
series of nearly identical statements, apparently for the sake of
amplitude. For example, the progress of the seeming funeral of the lady
in the _Gay Gos-hawk_:
At the first kirk of fair Scotland,
They gart the bells be rung;
At the second kirk of fair Scotland,
They gart the mass be sung.
At the third kirk of fair Scotland,
They dealt gold for her sake;
And the fourth kirk of fair Scotland,
Her true love met them at.
Or the following, in _Sweet Willie and Fair Annie_, which is almost the
same incident and relation of circumstances as the said seeming
funeral; only the lady in this case is dead:
The firsten bower that he cam till,
There was right dowie wark;
Her mother and her sisters three
Were making to Annie a sark.
The next bower that he cam till,
There was right dowie cheer;
Her father and her seven brethren
Were making to Annie a bier.
The lasten bower that he cam till,
O heavy was his care;
The waxen lights were burning bright,
And fair Annie streekit there.
In Scott's version of _Tam Lane_ there are some stanzas of so modern a
cast as to prove that this poem has been at least tampered with. For
example, the account of fairy life:
'And all our wants are well supplied
From every rich man's store,
Who thankless sins the gifts he gets,
And vainly grasps for more.'
Without regard, however, to such manifest patches, the general
structure and style of expression must be admitted to strongly recall
the other ballads which have been already commented on.
Only a wish to keep this dissertation within moderate bounds forbids me
to analyse a few other ballads, as the _Douglas Tragedy_, _Sweet Willie
and Fair Annie_, _Lady Maiery_, the _Clerk's Two Sons of Owsenford_,
and a Scotch _Heir of Linne_ lately recovered by Mr J. H. Dixon, all of
which, besides others which must rest unnamed, bear traces of the same
authorship with the ballads already brought under notice.
It is now to be remarked of the ballads published by the successors of
Percy, as of those which he published, that there is not a particle of
positive evidence for their having existed before the eighteenth
century. Overlooking the one given by Ramsay in his _Tea-table
Miscellany_, we have neither print nor manuscript of them before the
reign of George III. They are not in the style of old literature. They
contain no references to old literature. As little does old literature
contain any references to them. They wholly escaped the collecting
diligence of Bannatyne. James Watson, who published a collection of
Scottish poetry in 1706-1711, wholly overlooks them. Ramsay, as we see,
caught up only one. Even Herd, in 1769, only gathered a few fragments
of some of these poems. It was reserved for Sir Walter Scott and Robert
Jamieson, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to obtain copies
of the great bulk of these poems--that is, the ballads over and above
the few published by Percy--from A LADY--a certain 'Mrs Brown of
Falkland,' who seems to have been the wife of the Rev. Andrew Brown,
minister of that parish in Fife--is known to have been the daughter of
Professor Thomas Gordon, of King's College, Aberdeen--and is stated to
have derived her stores of legendary lore from the memory of her aunt,
a Mrs Farquhar, the wife of a small proprietor in Braemar, who had
spent the best part of her life among flocks and herds, but lived
latterly in Aberdeen. At the suggestion of Mr William Tytler, a son of
Mrs Brown wrote down a parcel of the ballads which her aunt had heard
in her youth from the recitation of nurses and old women.[28] Such were
the external circumstances, none of them giving the least support to
the assumed antiquity of the pieces, but rather exciting some suspicion
to the contrary effect.
[28] _Minstrelsy Scot. Border_, I. cxxvi.
When we come to consider the internal evidence, what do we find? We
find that these poems, in common with those published by Percy, are
composed in a style of romantic beauty and elevation distinguishing
them from all other remains of Scottish traditionary poetry. They are
quite unlike the palpably old historical ballads, such as the _Battle
of Otterbourne_ and the _Raid of the Reidswire_. They are unlike the
Border ballads, such as _Dick o' the Cow_, and _Jock o' the Syde_,
commemorating domestic events of the latter part of the sixteenth
century. They are strikingly unlike the _Burning of Frendraught_, the
_Bonny House o' Airly_, and the _Battle of Bothwell Bridge_,
contemporaneous metrical chronicles of events of the seventeenth
century. Not less different are they from a large mass of ballads,
which have latterly been published by Mr Peter Buchan and others,
involving romantic incidents, it is true, or eccentricities in private
life, but in such rude and homely strains as speak strongly of a
plebeian origin. In the ballads here brought under question, the
characters are usually persons of condition, generally richly dressed,
often well mounted, and of a dignified bearing towards all inferior
people. The page, the nurse, the waiting-woman, the hound, the hawk,
and other animals connected with the pageantry of high life, are
prominently introduced. Yet the characters and incidents are alike
relieved from all clear connection with any particular age: they may be
said to form a world of their own, of no particular era, wherein the
imagination of the reader may revel, as that of the author has done. It
may be allowably said, there is a tone of _breeding_ throughout these
ballads, such as is never found in the productions of rustic genius.
One marked feature--the pathos of deep female affections--the sacrifice
and the suffering which these so often involve--runs through nearly the
whole. References to religion and religious ceremonies and fanes are of
the slightest kind. We hear of bells being rung and mass sung, but only
to indicate a time of day. Had they been old ballads continually
changing in diction and in thought, as passed down from one reciter to
another, they could not have failed to involve some considerable trace
of the intensely earnest religious life of the seventeenth century; but
not the slightest tincture of this enthusiastic feeling appears in
them, a defect the more marked, as they contain abundant allusion to
the superstitions which survived into the succeeding time of religious
indifference, and indeed some of their best _effects_ rest in a
dexterous treatment of these weird ideas. There is but one exception to
what has been observed on the obscurity of the epoch pointed to for the
incidents--the dresses, properties, and decorations, are sometimes of a
modern cast. The writer--if we may be allowed to speculate on a single
writer--seems to have been unable to resist an inclination to indulge
in description of the external furnishings of the heroes and heroines,
or rather, perhaps, has been desirous of making out _effect_ from these
particulars; but the finery of the court of Charles II. is the furthest
point reached in the retrospect--although, I must admit, this is in
general treated with a vagueness that helps much to conceal the want of
learning.
Another point of great importance in the matter of internal evidence,
is the isolatedness of these ballads in respect of English traditionary
literature. The Scottish muse has not always gone hand in hand with the
English in point of time, but she has done so in all other respects.
Any literature we had from the beginning of the seventeenth century
downwards, was always sensibly tinged by what had immediately before
been in vogue in the south. Nor is it easy to see how a people
occupying part of the same island, and speaking essentially the same
language, should have avoided this communion of literary taste; but the
ballads in question are wholly unlike any English ballads. Look over
Percy, Evans, or Mr Collier's suite of _Roxburghe Ballads_, giving
those which were popular in London during the seventeenth century, and
you find not a trace of the style and manner of these Scottish romantic
ballads. Neither, it would appear, had one of them found its way into
popularity in England before the time of Percy; for, had it been
otherwise, he would have found them either in print or in the mouths of
the people.[29]
[29] Robert Jamieson found in the _Koempe Viser_, a Danish
collection of ballads published in 1695, one resembling the
Scottish ballad of _Fair Annie_ (otherwise called _Lady
Jane_), and on this ground he became convinced that many of
our traditionary ballads were of prodigious antiquity, though
they had been intermediately subjected to many alterations.
Mr Jamieson's belief seems remarkably ill supported, and as
it has never obtained any adherents among Scottish ballad
editors, I feel entitled to pass it over with but this slight
notice.
Upon all of these considerations, I have arrived at the conclusion,
that the high-class romantic ballads of Scotland are not ancient
compositions--are not older than the early part of the eighteenth
century--and are mainly, if not wholly, the production of one mind.
Whose was this mind, is a different question, on which no such
confident decision may for the present be arrived at; but I have no
hesitation in saying that, from the internal resemblances traced on
from _Hardyknute_ through _Sir Patrick Spence_ and _Gil Morrice_ to the
others, there seems to me a great _likelihood_ that the whole were the
composition of the authoress of that poem--namely, Elizabeth Lady
Wardlaw of Pitreavie.
It may be demanded that something should be done to verify, or at least
support, the allegation here made as to the peculiar literary character
of the suspected ballads. This is, of course, a point to be best made
out by a perusal of the entire body of this class of compositions, and
scarcely by any other means. Still, it is a difference so striking,
that even to present one typical ballad of true rustic origin, could
not fail to make a considerable impression on the reader, after he has
read specimens of those which are here attributed to a higher source.
Be it observed, when an uneducated person speaks of knights, lords, and
kings, or of dames and damosels, he reduces all to one homely level. He
indulges in no diplomatic periphrases. It is simply, the king said
this, and the lord said that--this thing was done, and that thing was
done--the catastrophe or _denouement_ comes by a single stroke. This we
find in the true stall-ballads. A vulgar, prosaic, and drawling
character pervades the whole class, with few exceptions--a fact which
ought to give no surprise, for does not all experience shew, that
literature of any kind, to have effect, requires for its production a
mind of some cultivation, and really good verse flowing from an
uninstructed source is what never was, is not now, and never will be?
With these remarks, I usher in a typical ballad of the common
class--one taken down many years ago from the singing of an old man in
the south of Scotland:
JAMES HATELIE.
It fell upon a certain day,
When the king from home he chanced to be,
The king's jewels they were stolen all,
And they laid the blame on James Hatelie.
And he is into prison cast,
And I wat he is condemned to _dee_;
For there was not a man in all the court
To speak a word for James Hatelie.
But the king's eldest daughter she loved him well,
But known her love it might not be;
And she has stolen the prison keys,
And gane in and discoursed wi' James Hatelie.
'Oh, did you steal them, James?' she said;
'Oh, did not you steal them, come tell to me?
For I'll make a vow, and I'll keep it true,
You's never be the worse of me.'
'I did not steal them,' James he said;
'And neither was it intended by me,
For the English they stole them themselves,
And I wat they've laid the blame on me.'
Now she has hame to her father gane,
And bowed her low down on her knee,
'I ask--I ask--I ask, father,' she said,
'I ask--I ask a boon of thee;
I never asked one in my life,
And one of them you must grant to me.'
'Ask on, ask on, daughter,' he said;
'And aye weel answered ye shall be;
For if it were my whole estate,
Naysaid, naysaid you shall not be.'
'I ask none of your gold, father,
As little of your white monie;
But all the asken that I do ask,
It is the life of James Hatelie.'
'Ask on, ask on, daughter,' he said;
'And aye weel answered ye shall be;
For I'll mak a vow, and keep it true--
James Hatelie shall not hanged be.'
'Another asken I ask, father;
Another asken I ask of thee--
Let Fenwick and Hatelie go to the sword,
And let them try their veritie.'
'Ask on, ask on, daughter,' he said;
'And aye weel answered you shall be;
For before the morn at twelve o'clock,
They both at the point of the sword shall be.'