'And thocht it oure weel made';
 

and again when the King's Daughter chose between father and lover in words that leap forth like a sword from its scabbard:

 
'I loot me low to my father for grace,
Down on my bended knee;
But I rise, and I look my king in the face,
For the Skipper 's the king o' me.'
 

But even here, where we touch high-water mark of the latter-day Scottish ballad, one seems to find a faint reminiscence of stage-setting and effect, of purposed antithesis, of ethical discriminations unfamiliar to the manner and mode of thought of the ancient balladist. The latter, it may be said, does not stop to think or to analyse or moralise; he feels, and is content to tell us in the most direct and naïve language, all that he has felt. He has not learned the new trick of introspection; he is guided by intuition and the primæval instincts. He carries from his own lips to ours a draught of pure, strong, human passion, stirred into action by provocations of love, jealousy, revenge, and grief such as visit but rarely our orderly, workaday modern world. He renders for us the 'form and express feature' of his time, and though the draughtsmanship may be rude, it is free from suspicion of either flattery or bias. It is not enlisted in the cause of any moral theory or literary ideal. It is, so far as it goes, truth naked and not ashamed.

But the native-grown ballad takes also colour from the ground whence it springs. It has the tang of the soil as well as the savour of the blood. Fletcher of Saltoun's hackneyed epigram, 'Let me make a country's ballads, and let who will make its laws,' does not embody all the truth. A country and the race inhabiting it may not be responsible for the laws that govern it. But a country and a people may rightly be tried and judged by their ballads – their own handiwork; their own offspring. The more cultured and highly-developed products of a national literature, however healthy, however strong and beautiful, must always owe much to neighbouring and to universal influences. Like the language and manners of the educated classes of a nation, they conform more or less to models of world-wide and age-long acceptance among educated men. But in the ballad one goes to the root of national character, to the pith and marrow of national life and history.

What then, thus questioned, do the Scottish ballads teach us of Scotland and the Scots? Surely much to be proud of. They are among the most precious, as they are among the oldest, of our possessions as a people. Nay, it may be held that they are the best and choicest of all the contributions that Scotland has made to poetry and story. They are written in her heart's blood. Even the songs of Burns and the tales of Scott must take second rank after the ballads; their purest inspiration was drawn from those rude old lays. In this field of national literature, at least, we need not fear comparison with any other land and people. Our ballads are distinctly different, and in the opinion of unbiassed literary judges, also distinctly superior to the rich and beautiful ballad-lore of the Southern Kingdom. One can even note an expressive diversity of style and spirit in the ballads originating on the North and on the South margin of the Border line. The latter do not yield in rough vigour and blunt manliness to the ballads grown on the northern slope of Cheviot. Chevy Chase may challenge comparison with The Battle of Otterburn, and come at least as well out of the contest as the Percy did from his meeting with the Douglas; and in many other ballads which the two nations have in common —The Heir of Linn, for example – the English may fairly be held to bear away the bell from the Scottish version. We do not possess a group of ballads pervaded so thoroughly with the freedom and delight of living under 'the leavés greene' as those of the Robin Hood Cycle; although we also have our songs of the 'gay greenwood'; although bows twanged as keenly in Ettrick Forest and in Braidislee Wood as in Sherwood itself, and we can even claim, partly, perhaps, as a relic of the days when the King of Scotland was Prince of Cumbria and Earl of Huntingdon, the bold Robin and his merry men among the heroes of our ballad literature.

But, on the whole, mirth and light-heartedness are very far from being characteristics of the Scottish ballads. Of ballad themes in general, it has been said that they concern themselves mainly with the tragedy and the pathos of the life of feudal and early times; while, on the other hand, the folk-song reflects the sunnier hours of the days of old. This is peculiarly true of the Scottish ballads. The best of them are dipped in gloom of the grave. They breathe the very soul of 'the old, unhappy far-off times.' Even over the true lovers, Fate stands from the first with a drawn sword; and the story ends with the 'jow of the deid bell' rather than with the wedding chimes. Superstitious terrors, too, add a shadow of their own to these tragedies of crossed and lawless love and swift-following vengeance. In this respect, the Scottish ballads are more nearly akin to the popular poetry of Denmark and other countries across the North Sea, than to that of our neighbours across the Tweed. There are a score of ballads that agree so closely in plot and structure, and even in names and phrases, with Norse or German versions, that it is impossible to doubt that they have been drawn directly from the same source. Either they have been transplanted thither in the many descents which the Northmen made on Scotland, as is witnessed not only by the chronicles, but by existing words, and customs, and place-names scattered thickly around our coasts; or, what may perhaps be as strongly argued, both versions may have come from an older and common original.

Celtic influences are also present, although scarcely, perhaps, so directly manifest as might have been expected, considering that the Celtic race and speech must at one time have been spread almost universally over Scotland; they appear rather in the spirit than in the plot and scene and characters of the typical Scottish ballad. They supply, unquestionably, a large portion of that feeling of mystery, of over-shadowing fate, and melancholy yearning – that air of another world surrounding and infecting the life of the senses – which seems to distinguish the body and soul of Scottish ballad poetry from the more matter-of-fact budget of the English minstrels.

But it has to be remembered that the matrix of the ballads that have taken first place in the love and in the memory of Scotland was the region most remote and isolated from the Highlands and the Highlanders during the ballad-making era. This is the basin of the Tweed – the howms of Yarrow; Leader haughs and Ettrick shaws; the clear streams that flow past ruined abbey and peel-tower, through green folds of the Cheviots and the Lammermuirs, that for hundreds of years were the chosen homes of Border war and romance. Next after these come the banks of Clyde and Forth; Annan Water and the streams of Ayr and Galloway; and ballads and ballad localities, differing somewhat, in theme and structure, in mood and metre, from those of the South, as Aberdonian differs from Borderer, and the Men of the Mearns from the Men of the Merse, are found scattered thinly or sprinkled thickly over the whole North, by Tay, and Dee, and Spey.

These latter streams are partly without and partly within the Highland Line, across which, as unacquainted with a language that has its own rich and peculiar store of legend and ballad poetry, we do not propose to penetrate; sufficient field for exploration is provided by the Scots ballads in Scots. But when these were in the making, the Highland Line must have run down much lower into the Lowlands than it does to-day; the retreating Gaelic had still outposts in Buchan, and even in Fife, and Ayr, and Galloway. In the ballads of the North-eastern Counties, the feuds of Highland chiefs and the raids of Highland caterans make themselves seen and felt, too visibly and not too sympathetically, in the ditties of their Lowland neighbours. 'The Hielandmen' play the part that the English clans from Bewcastle and Redesdale play in the Border ballads. The 'Red Harlaw' in those boreal provinces was a landmark and turning-point in history and poetry, as Bannockburn or Flodden was in the South. By Hangingshaws or Hermitage Castle they knew little of the Highlander, being too much absorbed in their own quarrels; on Donside and in the Lennox they knew him better than they liked him; and it was not until a comparatively recent period of literary history that the kilted warrior began to take his place as a heroic and imposing figure in the poetry and prose of the Scottish vernacular.

Making all allowance for borrowings and influences drawn from without, may we not still say that the Scottish ballad owes nearly all that is best in it – the sweetness not less than the strength of this draught of old poetry and passion – to the land and to the folk that gave it birth? A land thrust further into the gloom and cold of stormy seas than the Southern Kingdom; a land whose spare gifts are but the more esteemed by its children because they are given so grudgingly, whose high and bleak and stern features make the valleys they shelter the more lovely and loved from the contrast; a race whose blood has been blended of many strains, and tempered by long centuries of struggle with nature and with outside enemies; perfervid of spirit and dour of will; holding with strong grip to the things of this world, but never losing consciousness of the nearness and mystery of the world of things invisible; with a border-line on either side of them that for hundreds of years had to be kept with the strong hand and the stout heart, and behind them a background of history more charged with trouble and romance than that of almost any other nation in Europe – where should the ballad draw pith and sap and colour if not on such a soil and among such a people? If Mr. Buckle was able to trace the complexion and form of Scottish religion in the climate and configuration of Scotland, much more easily should we be able to find the atmosphere and scenery of Scotland reflected in her ballads.