ive me," said Fletcher of Saltoun, "the making of a nation's ballads,
and I will let you make its laws." This was, in our opinion, a speech of
considerable boldness; and if Fletcher really made it, he must have had
a high estimate of his own poetical powers. Why then, in the name of
Orpheus, did he not set about it incontinently? We presume that there
was nothing whatever to have prevented him from concocting as many
ballads as he chose; or from engaging, as engines of popular
promulgation, the ancestors of those unshaven and raucous gentlemen, to
whose canorous mercies we are wont, in times of political excitement, to
intrust our own personal and patriotic ditties. Seldom, indeed, have we
experienced a keener sense of our true greatness as a poet, than when we
encountered, on one occasion, a peripatetic minstrel, deafening the
Canongate with the notes of our particular music, and surrounded by an
eager crowd demanding the halfpenny broadsheet. "This is fame!" we
exclaimed to a legal friend who was beside us; and, with a glow of
triumph on our countenance, we descended the North Bridge, to indite
another of the same. Notwithstanding this, we cannot aver from
experience that our ballads have wrought any marked effect in modifying
the laws of the country. We cannot even go the length of asserting that
they have once turned an election; and therefore it is not unnatural
that we should regard the dogma of Fletcher with distrust. The truth is,
that a nation is the maker of its own ballads. You cannot by any
possibility contrive to sway people from their purpose by a song; but
songs--ballads especially--are the imperishable records of their
purpose. And therefore it is that they survive, because they are real
and not ideal. It is no feigned passion which they convey, but the
actual reflex of that which has arisen, and wrought, and expended
itself; and each historical ballad is, in fact, a memorial of a national
impulse; and wo be to the man who would attempt to illustrate the past,
if he cannot again create within himself the sympathies and the motives
which led to the deeds he must celebrate. Wo be to him, we say--for as
sure as there is truth in the retributive justice of posterity, he will
attain an eminent position, not in the roll of beatified bards, but in
that of the British blockheads, and be elected by unanimous consent as a
proper Laureate for the Fogie Club.

It is now a good many years since Sir Walter Scott compil