more deeply interested in the researches into popular poetry, since he must not disdain to gather from the tradition conveyed in ancient ditties and ballads, the information necessary to confirm or correct intelligence collected from more certain sources. And although the poets were a fabling race from the very beginning of time, and so much addicted to exaggeration, that their accounts are seldom to be relied on without corroborative evidence, yet instances frequently occur where the statements of poetical tradition are unexpectedly confirmed. To the lovers and admirers of poetry as an art, it cannot be uninteresting to have a glimpse of the National Muse in her cradle, or to hear her babbling the earliest attempts at the formation of the tuneful sounds with which she was afterwards to charm posterity. And I may venture to add, that among poetry, which, however rude, was a gift of Nature's first fruits, even a reader of refined taste will find his patience rewarded, by passages in which the rude minstrel rises into sublimity or melts into pathos. These were the merits which induced the classical Addison to write an elaborate commentary upon the ballad of Chevy Chase, and which roused, like the sound of a trumpet, the heroic blood of Sir Philip Sidney.2 It is true that passages of this high character seldom occur; for, during the infancy of the art of poetry, the bards have been generally satisfied with a rude and careless expression of their sentiments; and even when a more felicitous expression, or loftier numbers, have been dictated by the enthusiasm of the composition, the advantage came unsought for, and perhaps unnoticed, either by the minstrel or the audience. Another cause contributed to the tenuity of thought and poverty of expression, by which old ballads are too often distinguished. The apparent simplicity of the ballad stanza carried with it a strong temptation to loose and trivial composition. The collection of rhymes, accumulated by the earliest of the craft appear to have been considered as forming a joint stock for the common use of the profession; and not mere rhymes only, but verses and stanzas, have been used as common property, so as to give an appearance of sameness and crudity to the whole series of popular poetry. Such, for instance, is the salutation so often repeated,— "Now Heaven thee save, thou brave young knight, Now Heaven thee save and see." And such the usual expression for taking counsel with. Rede me, rede me, brother dear, › See The Spectator, No. 70 and 74. 1 never heard the old song of Percie and Douglas, that I found not my heart moved more than with the sound of a trumpet; and yet it is sung but by some blind crowder, with no rougher voice than rude style."-SIDNEY. Such also is the unvaried account of the rose and the brier, which are said to spring out of the grave of the hero and heroine of these metrical legends, with little effort at a variation of the expressions in which the incident is prescriptively told. The least acquaintance with the subject will recall a great number of commonplace verses, which each ballad-maker has unceremoniously appropriated to himself; thereby greatly facilitating his own task, and at the same time degrading his art by his slovenly use of overscutched phrases. From the same indolence, the ballad-mongers of most nations have availed themselves of every opportunity of prolonging their pieces, of the same kind, without the labour of actual composition. If a message is to be delivered, the poet saves himself a little trouble, by using exactly the same words in which it was originally conched, to secure its being transmitted to the person for whose ear it was intended. The bards of ruder climes, and less favoured languages, may indeed claim the countenance of Homer for such repetitions; but whilst, in the Father of Poetry, they give the reader an opportunity to pause, and look back upon the enchanted ground over which they have travelled, they afford nothing to the modern bard, save facilitating the power of stupifying the audience with stanzas of dull and tedious iteration. Another cause of the flatness and insipidity, which is the great imperfection of ballad poetry, is to be ascribed less to the compositions in their original state, when rehearsed by their authors, than to the ignorance and errors of the reciters or transcribers, by whom they have been transmitted to us. The more popular the composition of an ancient poet, or Maker, became, the greater chance there was of its being corrupted; for a poem transmitted through a number of reciters, like a book reprinted in a multitude of editions, incurs the risk of impertinent interpolations from the conceit of one rehearser, unintelligible blunders from the stupidity of another, and omissions equally to be regretted, from the want of memory in a third. This sort of injury is felt very early, and the reader will find a curious instance in the Introduction to the Romance of Sir Tristrem. Robert de Brunne there complains, that though the Romance of Sir Tristrem was the best which had ever been made, if it could be recited as composed by the author, Thomas of Erceldoune, yet that it was written in such an ornate style of language, and such a difficult strain of versification, as to lose all value in the mouths of ordinary minstrels, who could scarcely repeat one stanza without omitting some part of it, and marring, consequently, both the sense and the rhythm of the passage. This deterioration 3" That thou may hear in Sir Tristrem : If men it sayd as made Thomas; But of some copple some is away," &c. of this degrading species of alchymy, by which the ore of antiquity is deteriorated and adulterated. While Addison, in an age which had never attended to popular poetry, wrote his classical criticism on that ballad, he naturally took for his text the ordinary stall-copy, although he might, and ought to have suspected, that a ditty couched in the language nearly of his own time, could not be the same with that which Sir Philip Sidney, more than one hundred years before, had spoken of, as being "evil apparelled in the dust and cobwebs of an uncivilized age." The venerable Bishop Percy was the first to correct this mistake, by produ could not be limited to one author alone; others must have suffered from the same cause, in the same or a greater degree. Nay, we are authorised to conclude, that in proportion to the care bestowed by the author upon any poem, to attain what his age might suppose to be the highest graces of poetry, the greater was the damage which it sustained by the inaccuracy of reciters, or their desire to humble both the sense and diction of the poem to their powers of recollection, and the comprehension of a vulgar audience. It cannot be expected that compositions subjected in this way to mutilation and corruption, should continue to present their original sense or diction; and the accu-cing a copy of the song, as old at least as the reign of racy of our editions of popular poetry, unless in the rare event of recovering original or early copies, is lessened in proportion. But the chance of these corruptions is incalculably increased, when we consider that the ballads have been, not in one, but innumerable instances of transmission, liable to similar alterations, through a long course of centuries, during which they have been handed from one ignorant reciter to another, each discarding whatever original words or phrases time or fashion had, in his opinion, rendered obsolete, and substituting anachronisms by expressions taken from the customs of his own day. And here it may be remarked, that the desire of the reciter to be intelligible, however natural and laudable, has been one of the greatest causes of the deterioration of ancient poetry. The minstrel who endeavoured to recite with fidelity the words of the author, might indeed fall into errors of sound and sense, and substitute corruptions for words he did not understand. But the ingenuity of a skilful critic could often, in that case, revive and restore the original meaning; while the corrupted words became, in such cases, a warrant for the authenticity of the whole poem.1 In general, however, the later reciters appear to have been far less desirous to speak the author's words, than to introduce amendments and new readings of their own, which have always produced the effect of modernizing, and usually that of degrading and vulgarizing, the rugged sense and spirit of the antique minstrel. Thus, undergoing from age to age a gradual process of alteration and recomposition, our popular and oral minstrelsy has lost, in a great measure, its original appearance; and the strong touches by which it had been formerly characterised, have been generally smoothed down and destroyed by a process similar to that by which a coin, passing from hand to hand, loses in circulation all the finer marks of the impress. The very fine ballad of Chevy Chase is an example Henry VII., bearing the name of the author or tran- "The Percy owt of Northumberland, Becomes "The stout Earl of Northumberland A vow to God did make, His pleasure in the Scottish woods Three summer days to take," &c. From this, and other examples of the same kind, of which many might be quoted, we must often expect to find the remains of Minstrel poetry, composed originally for the courts of princes and halls of nobles, disguised in the more modern and vulgar dialect in which they have been of late sung to the frequenters of the rustic ale-bench. It is unnecessary to mention more than one other remarkable and humbling instance, printed in the curious collection entitled, a Ballad-Book, where we find, in the words of the ingenious Editor,3 a stupid ballad, printed as it was sung 1 An instance occurs in the valuable old ballad, called Auld Maitland. The reciter repeated a verse, descriptive of the defence of a castle, thus: "With spring-wall, stanes, and goads of airn Among them fast he threw." for casting darts or stones; the restoration of which reading gives a precise and clear sense to the lines. 2 See Percy's Reliques, vol. i. p. 2. 3 Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, Esq. The Ballad-Book was printed in 1823, and inscribed to Sir Walter Scott; the im Spring-wall, is a corruption of springald, a military engine pression consisting of only thirty copies. in Annandale, founded on the well-known story of the Prince of Salerno's daughter, but with the uncouth change of Dysmal for Ghismonda, and Guiscard transformed into a greasy kitchen-boy. "To what base uses may we not return!" Sometimes a still more material and systematic difference appears between the poems of antiquity, as they were originally composed, and as they now exist. This occurs in cases where the longer metrical romances, which were in fashion during the middle ages, were reduced to shorter compositions, in order that they might be chanted before an inferior audience. A ballad, for example, of Thomas of Erceldoune, and his intrigues with the Queen of Faery-Land, is, or has been, long current in Teviotdale, and other parts of Scotland. Two ancient copies of a poem, or romance, on the same subject, and containing very often the same words and turns of expression, are preserved in the libraries of the Cathedral of Lincoln and Peterborough. We are left to conjecture whether the originals of such ballads have been gradually contracted into their modern shape by the impatience of later audiences, combined with the lack of memory displayed by more modern reciters, or whether, in particular cases, some ballad-maker may have actually set himself to work to retrench the old details of the minstrels, and regularly and systematically to modernize, and if the phrase be permitted, to balladize, a metrical romance. We are assured, however, that "Roswal and Lilian" was sung through the streets of Edinburgh two generations since; and we know that the Romance of "Sir Eger, Sir Grime, and Sir Greysteil," had also its own particular chant, or tune. The stall-copies of both these romances, as they now exist, are very much abbreviated, and probably exhibit them when they were undergoing, or had nearly undergone, the process of being cut down into ballads. will be accomplished, by shortly noticing the popular poetry of Scotland, and some of the efforts which have been made to collect and illustrate it. It is now generally admitted that the Scots and Picts, however differing otherwise, were each by descent a Celtic race; that they advanced in a course of victory somewhat farther than the present frontier between England and Scotland, and about the end of the eleventh century subdued and rendered tributary the Britons of Strathcluyd, who were also a Celtic race like themselves. Excepting, therefore, the provinces of Berwickshire and the Lothians, which were chiefly inhabited by an Anglo-Saxon population, the whole of Scotland was peopled by different tribes of the same aboriginal race,2—a race passionately addicted to music, as appears from the kindred Celtic nations of Irish, Welsh, and Scottish, preserving each to this day a style and character of music peculiar to their own country, though all three bear marks of general resemblance to each other. That of Scotland, in particular, is early noticed and extolled by ancient authors, and its remains, to which the natives are passionately attached, are still found to afford pleasure even to those who cultivate the art upon a more refined and varied system. This skill in music did not, of course, exist without a corresponding degree of talent for a species of poetry, adapted to the habits of the country, celebrating the victories of triumphant clans, pouring forth lamentations over fallen heroes, and recording such marvellous adventures as were calculated to amuse individual families around their household fires, or the whole tribe when regaling in the hall of the chief. It happened, however, singularly enough, that while the music continued to be Celtic in its general measure, the language of Scotland, most commonly spoken, began to be that of their neighbours, the English, introduced by the multitude of Saxons who thronged to the court of Malcolm Canmore and his successors; by the crowds of prisoners of war, whom the repeated ravages of the Scots in Northumberland carried off as slaves to their country; by the influence of the inha Taking into consideration the various indirect channels by which the popular poetry of our ancestors has been transmitted to their posterity, it is nothing surprising that it should reach us in a mutilated and de-bitants of the richest and most populous provinces in graded state, and that it should little correspond with the ideas we are apt to form of the first productions of national genius; nay, it is more to be wondered at that we possess so many ballads of considerable merit, than that the much greater number of them which must have once existed, should have perished before our time. Having given this brief account of ballad poetry in general, the purpose of the present prefatory remarks Scotland, Berwickshire, namely, and the Lothians, over the more mountainous; lastly, by the superiority which a language like the Anglo-Saxon, considerably refined, long since reduced to writing, and capable of expressing the wants, wishes, and sentiments of the speakers, must have possessed over the jargon of various tribes of Irish and British origin, limited and contracted in every varying dialect, and differing, at the same time, from each other. This superiority being 1 These two ancient Romances are reprinted in a volume of "Early Metrical Tales," edited by Mr. David Laing, Edinburgh, 1826, small 8vo. Only 175 copies printed. 2 The author seems to have latterly modified his original opinion on some parts of this subject. In his reviewal of Mr. P. F. Tytler's History of Scotland (Quart. Rev. vol. xli. p. 328,) he says, speaking of the period of the final subjuga tion of the Picts, "It would appear the Scandinavians had colonies along the fertile shores of Moray, and among the mountains of Sutherland, whose name speaks for itself, that it was given by the Norwegians; and probably they had also settlements in Caithness and the Orcades." In this essay, however, he adheres in the main to his Anti-Pinkertonian doctrine, and treats the Picts as Celts.-ED. The usual stanza which was selected as the most natural to the language and the sweetest to the ear, after the complex system of the more courtly mea considered, and a fair length of time being allowed, it is no wonder that, while the Scottish people retained their Celtic music, and many of their Celtic customs, together with their Celtic dynasty, they should never-sures, used by Thomas of Erceldoune, was laid aside, theless have adopted, throughout the Lowlands, the Saxon language, while in the Highlands they retained the Celtic dialect, along with the dress, arms, manners, and government of their fathers. was that which, when originally introduced, we very often find arranged in two lines, thus: "Earl Douglas on his milk-white steed, most like a baron bold, Rode foremost of his company, whose armour shone like gold;" but which, after being divided into four, constitutes what is now generally called the ballad stanza,— "Earl Douglas on his milk-white steed, Most like a baron bold, Rode foremost of his company, Whose armour shone like gold." There was, for a time, a solemn national recognisance that the Saxon language and poetry had not originally been that of the royal family. For, at the coronations of the kings of Scotland, previous to Alexander III., it was a part of the solemnity, that a Celtic bard stepped forth, so soon as the king assumed his seat upon the fated stone, and recited the genealogy of the monarch in Celtic verse, setting forth his descent, and the right which he had by birth to occupy the place of sovereignty. For a time, no doubt, the The breaking of the lines contains a plainer intiCeltic songs and poems remained current in the Low-mation how the stanza ought to be read, than every lands, while any remnant of the language yet lasted. one could gather from the original mode of writing The Gaelic or Irish bards, we are also aware, occa-out the poem, where the position of the cæsura, or insionally strolled into the Lowlands, where their music might be received with favour, even after their recitation was no longer understood. But though these aboriginal poets showed themselves at festivals and other places of public resort, it does not appear that, as in Homer's time, they were honoured with high places at the board, and savoury morsels of the chine; but they seem rather to have been accounted fit company for the feigned fools and sturdy beggars, with whom they were ranked by a Scottish statute.1 Time was necessary wholly to eradicate one language and introduce another; but it is remarkable that, at the death of Alexander the Third, the last Scottish king of the pure Celtic race, the popular lament for his death was composed in Scoto-English, and, though closely resembling the modern dialect, is the earliest example we have of that language, whether in prose or poetry.2 About the same time flourished the celebrated Thomas the Rhymer, whose poem, written in English, or Lowland Scottish, with the most anxious attention both to versification and alliteration, forms, even as it now exists, a very curious specimen of the early romance. Such complicated construction was greatly too concise for the public ear, which is best amused by a looser diction, in which numerous repetitions, and prolonged descriptions, enable the comprehension of the audience to keep up with the voice of the singer or reciter, and supply the gaps which in general must have taken place, either through a failure of attention in the hearers, or of voice and distinct enunciation on the part of the minstrel. 1 A curious account of the reception of an Irish or Celtic bard at a festival, is given in Sir John Holland's Buke of the Houlat, Bannatyne edition, p. liii. "Whan Alexander our king was ded, Wha Scotland led in luve and lee, Away was sons of ale and bred, Of wine and wax, of game and glee," &c. flection of voice, is left to the individual's own taste. This was sometimes exchanged for a stanza of six lines, the third and sixth rhyming together. For works of more importance and pretension, a more complicated versification was still retained, and may be found in the tale of Ralph Coilzear,3 the Adventures of Arthur at the Tarn-Wathelyn, Sir Gawain, and Sir Gologras, and other scarce romances. A spe cimen of this structure of verse has been handed down to our times in the stanza of Christ Kirk on the Green, transmitted by King James I., to Allan Ramsay and to Burns. The excessive passion for alliteration, which formed a rule of the Saxon poetry, was also retained in the Scottish poems of a more elevated character, though the more ordinary minstrels and ballad-makers threw off the restraint. The varieties of stanza thus adopted for popular poetry were not, we may easily suppose, left long unemployed. In frontier regions, where men are continually engaged in active enterprise, betwixt the task of defending themselves and annoying their neighbours, they may be said to live in an atmosphere of danger, the excitation of which is peculiarly favourable to the encouragement of poetry. Hence, the expressions of Lesly the historian, quoted in the following Introduction, in which he paints the delight taken by the Borderers in their peculiar species of music, and the rhyming ballads in which they celebrated the feats of their ancestors, or recorded their own ingenious stratagems in predatory warfare. In the same Introduction, the reader will find the reasons alleged why the taste for song was and must have been longer 3 This, and most of the other romances here referred to, may be found reprinted in a volume, entitled, "Select Remains of the Ancient Popular Poetry of Scotland," (Edin. 1822. Small 4to.) Edited by Mr. David Laing, and inscribed to Sir Walter Scott. 4 See Minstrelsy of the Scottish Eorder, vol. i. p. 213. preserved on the Border than in the interior of the of an anonymous editor of three 12mo volumes, which country. appeared in London, with engravings. These volumes came out in various years, in the beginning of the 18th century. The editor writes with some flippancy, but with the air of a person superior to the ordinary drudgery of a mere collector. His work appears to have been got up at considerable expense, and the gene Having thus made some remarks on early poetry in general, and on that of Scotland in particular, the Editor's purpose is, to mention the fate of some previous attempts to collect ballad poetry, and the principles of selection and publication which have been adopted by various editors of learning and informa-ral introductions and historical illustrations which are tion; and although the present work chiefly regards the Ballads of Scotland, yet the investigation must necessarily include some of the principal collections among the English also. Of manuscript records of ancient ballads, very few have been yet discovered. It is probable that the minstrels, seldom knowing either how to read or write, trusted to their well-exercised memories. Nor was it a difficult task to acquire a sufficient stock in trade for their purpose, since the Editor has not only known many persons capable of retaining a very large collection of legendary lore of this kind, but there was a period in his own life, when a memory that ought to | have been charged with more valuable matter, enabled him to recollect as many of these old songs as would have occupied several days in the recitation. The press, however, at length superseded the necessity of such exertions of recollection, and sheafs of ballads issued from it weekly, for the amusement of the sojourners at the alehouse, and the lovers of poetry in grange and hall, where such of the audience as could not read, had at least read unto them. These fugitive leaves, generally printed upon broadsides, or in small miscellanies called Garlands, and circulating amongst persons of loose and careless habits-so far as books were concerned-were subject to destruction from many causes; and as the editions in the early age of printing were probably much limited, even those published as chap-books in the early part of the 18th century, are rarely met with. Some persons, however, seem to have had what their contemporaries probably thought the bizarre taste of gathering and preserving collections of this fugitive poetry. Hence the great body of ballads in the Pepysian collection at Cambridge, made by that Secretary Pepys, whose Diary is so very amusing; and hence the still more valuable deposit, in three volumes folio, in which the late Duke John of Roxburghe took so much pleasure, that he was often found enlarging it with fresh acquisitions, which he pasted in and registered with his own hand. The first attempt, however, to reprint a collection of ballads for a class of readers distinct from those for whose use the stall-copies were intended, was that prefixed to the various ballads, are written with an accuracy of which such a subject had not till then been deemed worthy. The principal part of the collection consists of stall-ballads, neither possessing much poetical merit, nor any particular rarity or curiosity. Still this original Miscellany holds a considerable value amongst collectors; and as the three volumes-being published at different times-are seldom found together, they sell for a high price when complete. We may now turn our eyes to Scotland, where the facility of the dialect, which cuts off the consonants in the termination of the words, so as greatly to simplify the task of rhyming, and the habits, dispositions, and manners of the people, were of old so favourable to the composition of ballad-poetry, that, had the Scottish songs been preserved, there is no doubt a very curious history might have been composed by means of minstrelsy only, from the reign of Alexander III. in 1285, down to the close of the Civil Wars in 1745. That materials for such a collection existed, cannot be disputed, since the Scottish historians often refer to old ballads as authorities for general tradition. But their regular preservation was not to be hoped for or expected. Successive garlands of song sprung, flourished, faded, and were forgotten, in their turn; and the names of a few specimens are only preserved, to show us how abundant the display of these wild flowers had been. Like the natural free gifts of Flora, these poetical garlands can only be successfully sought for where the land is uncultivated; and civilisation and increase of learning are sure to banish them, as the plough of the agriculturist bears down the mountain daisy. Yet it is to be recorded with some interest, that the earliest surviving specimen of the Scottish press, is a Miscellany of Millar and Chapman, which preserves a considerable fund of Scottish popular poetry, and among other things, no bad specimen of the gests of Robin Hood," the English ballad-maker's joy," and whose renown seems to have been as freshly preserved in the north as on the southern shores of the Tweed. There were probably several collections of Scottish ballads and metrical pieces during the seventeenth century. A very fine one, belonging to Lord Montagu, 1 "A Collection of Old Ballads, collected from the best and most ancient Copies extant, with Introductions, Historical and Critical, illustrated with copperplates." This anonymous collection, first published in 1723, was so well received, that it soon passed to a second edition, and two more volumes were added in 1723 and 1725. The third edition of the first olume is dated 1727.-ED. 2 A facsimile reprint, in black-letter, of the Original Tracts which issued from the press of Walter Chepman and Andro Myllar at Edinburgh, in the year 1508, was published under the title of "The Knightly Tale of Golagrus and Gawane, and other Ancient Poems," in 1827, 4to. The" itil geste" of Robin Hood, referred to in the text, is a fragment of a piece contained in Ritson's Collection.-ED. |
