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But they who manned the ships were Men,
The bravest of the brave,

Who vowed they'd sit at bridal feast,
Or lie in honoured grave.

And when the third time unappalled
They sought the middle-deep,
He whom the Winds and Waves obey
Had hushed them both asleep.
And though the chill divorcing wind
Knew but a restless rest,

And tossing in its night-mare dream,
Ruffled the ocean's breast;
Yet cheerily the ships sailed on,
Cheerily west and east:

"We bring the ring: Go call the guests,
And pray the wedding-priest."

They sailed by night, they sailed by day!---
The long betrothed lands

From bridegroom passed to bride the ring
And joined their willing hands.

Loud when the ships had reached each shore,
The cannon spake in thunder;

"Whom God hath joined," they seemed to say,
"Let no man put asunder."

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And then around the wondrous ring

The blessed greeting ran,

Glory to God! On Earth be Peace,
Goodwill to every man."

So now methinks this Earth of ours
More like to Heaven should be,
When we have seen an end of Time,
And there is no more Sea.

GEORGE WILSON.

INDUSTRIAL MUSEUM, EDINBURGH,
September 1858.

THE BALLAD POETRY OF SCOTLAND AND OF IRELAND.*

"IF a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation." This is a saying which has often been cited, not always quite so accurately, perhaps, as on the present occasion; but we do not remember that the memorable conditions under which it was uttered have ever been alluded to in connection with it. Some collectors of curious tracts may possess "an account of a conversation concerning a right regulation of governments for the common good of mankind, in a letter to the Marquis of Montrose, the Earls of Rothes, Roxburgh, and Haddington, from London, the 1st of December 1703." The author was the renowned Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, and he who peruses the little tract will, after certain dialogues as spirited as they are original, come at last to the saying about ballads, which has, as it were, dropped out of its setting and been tossed about in the literary world to be appreciated by its own intrinsic merit as a separate gem. To understand, however, the full import intended to be given to it, and the tenor of the spirited dialogue in which it is spoken, there are some preliminary matters to be kept in view. Ă time was coming when a nation, endowed with an almost matchless train of the noblest historical traditions, was to sink her government and her historical name in fusion with a neighbouring nation, greater and more powerful, but not more truly illustrious. True, it was not submission to the sword of the conqueror-not even an ignoble or unworthy compromise. Firm to the last in its proud policy of independence, the lesser nation stood out for fair and honourable terms of union, and obtained them, even from those who would give them rather from fear than from fairness. True, also, there appeared in prospect the termination of a long cycle of strife

1858.

the commencement of a peaceful future, and the prospect, afterwards well realised, of a national prosperity which neither nation-and especially the weaker of the two-could ever achieve during repeated centuries of hostility. But still, among those who most cordially concurred in the policy, and even the necessity, of the union, there could not fail to be deep-settled regrets, that in their day, and by their hands, the long line of historical tradition should be broken, so that an illustrious nationality should live in the history of the past alone. We regret for a short time when such a thing comes to pass near our door, as in the extinction of an ancient house, the fall of an old ancestral tree, the removal of a venerable bridge or street-even the stopping of the old customary stage-coach superseded by the railway. How deep, then, must have flowed the fountains of regret in those who saw the last Parliament of Scotland ride back from its old hall in all its feudal pageantry to resign its office for ever, and who felt that last solemn procession to be the symbol that a nation had died out with all its associations.

Fletcher of Saltoun was one of those who admitted the necessity of a union, while his impetuous and sensitive nature rendered him keenly alive to all the sorrows of the occasion. He had led a strange, wild, checkered life; had been a soldier in different parts of the world—a rebel and conspirator at home-an archæologist and devotee of literary research among the ruins of ancient nations. Whatever he did he did with impetuosity. He took his politics from the purity and single-minded loftiness which it was fashionable to attribute to the patriots of antiquity, and he professed the same rude simplicity of motive and action which he found in the Homeric heroes and in the ballads of his own dear country.

The Ballads of Scotland, edited by WILLIAM EDMONSTOUNE AYTOUN, 2 vols., The Ballads of Ireland, collected and edited by EDWARD HAYES, 2 vols.

Accomplished he was withal, and a very pure, vigorous-writer of English. Such was the person who tells us that he was walking one fine day slowly and alone in the Mall, when he was overtaken by his countryman the Earl of Cromarty, and Sir Christopher Musgrave. The three adjourned together-as gentlemen did then and do now-to the apartments of Sir Christopher, where they were joined by Sir Edward Seymour, and all took dinner with its adjuncts. Thus it is that, whether in allegory, or as the Boswellian record of what really took place, we are introduced to the conversation of this select convivial party. The first topic of conversation presents a curious contrast to many conversations which have taken place in the same neighbourhood among members of Parliament and other persons. Sir Christopher's lodgings in Whitehall have the good fortune to overlook the river Thames, and the speaking starts with rapturous eulogiums on the beauty and salubrity of that river. "You have here, gentlemen," said the Earl, "two of the noblest objects that can entertain the eye-the finest river and the greatest city in the world. When natural things are in the greatest perfection, they never fail to produce most wonderful effects. This most gentle and navigable river, with the excellent genius and industrious inclination of the English people, have raised this glorious city to such a height that, if all things be rightly considered, we shall find it very far to surpass any other." Before the Scottish lord has gone much further, Sir Christopher takes up the eulogium in a more specific strain, indulging in some optimisms on which the tremendous sanitary problem, handed down for the working out of the present generation, is a sad practical commentary. "The whole town lies upon a shelving situation, descending easily, and, as it were, in the form of a theatre, towards the south and river, covered from the north, north-east, and northwest winds; so that, in very cold and stormy weather, by means of the buildings of the city, and on the bridge, it is both warm and calm upon the river, which being, as it

were, the string of the bow, affords the great conveniency of a cheap and steady conveyance from one part to the other. The shelving situation of the city is not only most fitted to receive the kind influences of the sun, but to carry off, by common sewers and other ways, the mire and dirt of the streets into the river, which is cleansed by the tides twice every day. But above all, the ground on which the city stands, being a gravel, renders the inhabitants healthful, and the adjacent country wholesome and beautiful. The county of Kent furnishes us with the choicest fruit; Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire with corn; Lincolnshire, Essex, and Surrey, with beef, veal, and mutton; Buckinghamshire with wood for fuel; and the river, with all that the seas and the rest of the world afford." And so the English statesman and the Scottish courtier go on rivalling each other in their glowing pictures of the greatness and glory of England, in order that they may impress upon the Scottish patriot the good fortune in store for his own impoverished country in so august an alliance. The eulogium rises until it irritates the haughty Scot to sarcastic scepticism, which, in its turn, brings out remarks not merely in laudation of England, but in disparagement of Scotland. The debate gets hot. Sir Edward, all in a flame, cries out-" What a pother is here about an union with Scotland, of which all the advantage we shall have will be no more than what a man gets by marrying a beggar-a louse for her portion." The sting of putting such words into the English gentleman's mouth was that he had actually uttered them in Parliament, and a report of them carried to Scotland had aggravated the national exasperation. Fletcher put them into the dialogue that he might have the opportunity of indulging in one of his own touches of courtly irony. "I wonder," he says of Sir Edward, "he is not afraid such language should make us suspect him not to be descended of the noble family whose name he bears." Sir Edward passes on to still hotter ground. What account should England make, forsooth, of a country so often trampled under foot by their

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armies? Were not the Scots routed by Somerset, "and of late years did not the very scum of our nation conquer you?" Yes," said I, "after they had, with our assistance, conquered the king, and the nobility, and gentry of England; and yet that which you call a conquest was a dispute between parties, and not a national quarrel.' "It was," said he, "inseparable from the fortune of our Edwards to triumph over your nation." "Do you mean Edward of Carnarvon," said I," and his victory of Bannockburn?" "No," replied he, "I mean Edward I. and III., whose heroic actions no princes have ever equalled." "Sure," said I, "you do not mean the honour of the first or the humanity of the third, so signally manifested at Berwick; nor the murder of Wallace by the first Edward, or the poisoning of Randolph Earl of Murray by the third, after they had both refused to give battle to those heroes?"

The high eulogium on England and its capital with which the discourse began, naturally does not stand out through such stormy talk as this, The shrine of national riches and magnanimity raised before the eye of the Scot to tempt his cupidity, is rent open, and behold, it is a whited sepulchre full of rottenness and dead men's bones. Scotland may be poor in the elements of mere material wealth; but she has those things which gold can never buy-bravery, hardihood, and purity of heart, while the wealth and external prosperity of England only cover an internal corruption and progressive decay which will bring her, in the end, to shame. To prepare him for indignantly denying the honour and favour conferred on his own country by the proposed alliance, he gets the Englishmen themselves to say, "in this city, gamesters, stock-jobbers, jockies, and wagerers, make now the most considerable figure, and in few years have attained to such a degree of perfection in their several ways, that, in comparison to many of the nobility, gentry, and merchants of England, those in Newgate are mere ignorants and wretches of no experience.' Again, in the words of Sir Christopher, "even the poorer sort

of both sexes are daily tempted to all manner of lewdness by infamous ballads sung in every corner of the streets." "One would think," said the Earl," this last were of no great consequence." I said, "I knew a very wise man so much of Sir Christopher's sentiment, that he believed if a man were permitted to make all the ballads he need not care who should make the laws of a nation." Such are the circumstances under which this aphorism was uttered; and they are not uninstructive in bringing us practically home to those qualities of our national minstrelsy which, in a mind like Fletcher's, naturally formed an element in that estimate so favourable to his own country, which he took of the coming union.

It is evident that he cannot have meant that an arbitrary monopoly of the making of the ballads would give its possessor the power of wielding the popular mind, but merely, in a terse shape, to show how emphatically that popular mind was embodied in the popular literature which arises out of it, and consequently bears the lines and features of all its more emphatic characteristics. Looking homewards, he could see, as we do now, the ballad poetry of his country representing its thorough nationality a quality of which the strength is deepened by contrast when our minstrelsy is compared with that of other countries, and especially with the Irish. It is begotten of a national feeling which never sacrifices any of the native traditions, however much they may have been the creatures of party strife, to any foreign influences. When the strife is over, we take even the offending side to our heart more readily than the stranger. About Wallace, Bruce, and the other heroes of national independence, there never can be two sides in Scotland. In Ireland there would probably have been a strong Anglo-Norman party. The most zealous enemies of the old French interest look back with a melancholy pride on the beauty, the fascinations, and the talent of Queen Mary; and even, if in heart believing her guilty, can drop a sympathising thought over the terrible disasters of her life and

the mournful tragedy of her death; while, on the other hand, loyal hearts are not without their homage to the stern virtues of the leaders of the Congregation and the noble genius of Buchanan. Taking a later epoch, there are some who almost waver between their devotion to the military genius of Montrose and the dashing valour of Claverhouse on the one side, and their sympathy with the stern fanaticism and self-denying zeal of the Covenanters on the other. What literature-what country but ours, for instance, could have produced the noble balancing of party virtues and party vices in Old Mortality Nothing stirs the sympathy even of the steadiest supporters of constitutional government more than the chivalrous devotion of the men who threw their fortunes and fate into the lot of the exiled Stuarts. The Jacobite minstrelsy finds a way to all hearts. Whether it may have arisen from our long triumphant resistance to aggression, or from whatever other cause, so it is that no achievements by our own Scots are ever derided or discarded by their descendants. We have thus no pariah or outcast among us. The very last - accepted member of our circle, the long-discarded Highlander, has become so important among us that strangers take him for the proper national type. With some rooted defects, he has turned out a showy, dashing fellow, and the grave Lowlander is perhaps rather proud of him than otherwise.

These national characteristics have rendered our ballad poetry what it is. It has not been made for us, but has grown up among us. Full as it is of genius, wit, and poetic skill, it knows no authorship but that of the country at large. It is truly autochthonous. We cannot point to the author of one of the pieces legitimately belonging to it, nor to the age when it was written-if written it could be said to be. The whole rich vein was found among the people, like some geological deposit which had come into existence by no mere human means. They have been handed down from generation to generation, sometimes apparently improved at others, perhaps, damaged-in their

VOL. LXXXIV.—NO. DXVI.

transference from one to another; and thus they are what our antiquaries have found them. It is a consideration, however, and a consideration very much to the point on the present occasion, that this process of national ballad growing and ballad preserving can only go on while those concerned in the process are unconscious of the presence of an outer world with an eye fixed upon it. The moment it is discovered, and public attention drawn to it, it stops. In other words, pure tradition and publication cannot go on togetherthe one confuses the other. Any one who attempts to verify traditions which have made their way into popular literature, will be sure to find that what is told him as the old tradition of the spot, will be a repetition more or less inaccurate of the latest shape in which the tradition has appeared in print. And so of the ballad as of other traditions-the time will shortly be, if it has not yet come, when the oldest woman in the country will only be able to repeat to you "Gil Morice" or "Sir Patrick Spens" from some printed version. During the purely traditional period, and through that transition period in which very old people remembered ballads as they had heard them before they had appeared in print, many active and zealous men have been employed in collecting and verifying this floating minstrelsy. As it is scarcely possible that any new additions should be made to the store, the time seemed to have come for sifting and assorting what had been gathered into the granary.

The task has been fortunately undertaken by the very man to whose hands it seemed legitimately to fall. For reasons, which the public will very well understand, we are not going to enter on a criticism of the manner in which Professor Aytoun has accomplished his task. It is gratifying to find it proclaimed by the general voice of the press that he has fulfilled his duty to the anonymous literature of his country in a manner worthy of his own fame, and to be assured on all hands that his collection is henceforth to be considered the standard edition of the ballad poetry of Scotland.

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