they saw with their eyes and heard with their
ears. But even in these days the precious lode of ballad poetry will
sometimes break to the surface; a phrase or a whole verse, fashioned in
the Iron Age, will recall the Age of Gold. Scott has many such; and, to
take a more modern instance, the spirit of _Sir Patrick Spens_ seems to
inspire almost throughout George MacDonald's _Yerl o' Watery Deck_, now
with a graphic stroke of description, anon with a sudden gleam of
humour, as when the Skipper, in haste to escape his pursuers, hacked
with his sword at the stout rope that bound his craft to the pier,

'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 naive language, all
that he has felt. He has not learned the new trick of introspection; he
is guided by intuition and the primaeval 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; th