enuine
'antique,' has long been proved to be an imitative production of Lady
Wardlaw's. The rhyme which the Scottish maidens sang about Bannockburn
is lost. The Wallace group of ballads bears plain marks of spurious
intermixture, or later composition. There are no traditional verses
preserved in popular memory regarding the disasters of Neville's Cross
or of Homildon Hill, where so much good Scots blood soaked an alien sod;
or of that shameful day of Solway Moss, about which James the Fifth
muttered strange words on his dying-bed. Even the pathetic strain, more
lyrical, however, than narrative, in which lament is made for _The
Flowers o' the Forest_, that were 'wede awa'' at Flodden, came two
centuries later than the woful battle.

Perhaps it is natural that a warlike people should sing of their
triumphs rather than of their defeats and humiliations. But if the old
ballads have lost sight of some great landmarks in the country's
chronicle, they have preserved names and incidents which the duller pen
of history has forgotten or overlooked. The breath of poetry passes over
the Valley of Bones of the national annals, and each knight stands up in
his place, a breathing man and a living soul. They are none the less
real and living for us because Dry-as-dust has mislaid the vouchers for
their birth and their deeds, and cannot fit them into their place in his
family trees and chronological tables.

It follows, from the strongly patriotic cast of the ballads of war and
fray, that they should have sprung up most rankly on the battle-fields
and around the peel-towers of the Borderland. It was on the line of the
Tweed and of the Cheviots that the long quarrel was fought out; and thus
the Merse, Ettrick Forest, and Teviotdale; the Debateable Land,
Liddesdale, and Annan Water became the native countries of the songs of
raid and battle. The 'Red Harlaw'--which has had its own homespun bard,
although of a different note and fibre from the minstrels of the
Border--may be said to have ended the struggle for the mastery between
Highlands and Lowlands. From thence onward through the age of
ballad-making, there were _spreaghs_ and feuds enow upon and within the
Highland Line. But, until the time when Jacobitism came to give change
of theme and bent, along with change of scene, to the spirit of Scottish
romance, none of these local bloodlettings sufficed to inspire a ballad
of more than local fame; unless indeed the story drew part of its