prise. But the scene of rescue is shifted from Carlisle to Newcastle
in the one case, and to Dumfries Tolbooth in the other. Hobbie Noble,
the English outlaw, performs for the redoubtable Jock o' the Side the
service rendered by Red Rowan; and 'mettled John Hall o' laigh
Teviotdale' clatters down the Tolbooth stairs with Archie Armstrong of
the Calfhill on his back, to mount him on his fleet black mare. And from
the safe side of Tyne and of Nith, instead of Eden, they send their
jeers and challenges back at the discomfited English pursuers. The old
balladists may have mixed up places, names, and incidents in their
memories, as they were rather wont to do, and laid skaith or credit at
the wrong doors. But while their poetic and dramatic merit may vary, the
spirit of the very baldest of these ancient songs is irresistible. The
Border reiver may play a foul trick in the game; the Armstrongs, for
instance, requited scurvily the services of Hobbie Noble, 'the man that
lowsed Jock o' the Side;' but the roughest of these tykes, whether they
rode behind the Captain of Bewcastle or the Laird of Buccleuch or
Ferniehirst, or fought for their own hand, had their own code of honour,
and the balladist zealously and jealously measures by it their acts and
words. The worst of them had courage; they snap their fingers and laugh
in the very teeth of death. Hobbie Noble, with the can of beer at his
lips and the rope about his neck, could sing with an approving
conscience--

'"Now, fare thee well, sweet Mangerton,
For ne'er again I will thee see;
I wad hae betrayed nae man alive
For a' the gowd in Christentie"'--

a farewell that reminds us of that of the Highland cateran, Macpherson,
who 'so rantingly, so dantonly,' played a spring and danced to it
beneath the gallows-tree at Banff, crying out the while against
'treacherie,' and broke his fiddle across his knee when none among the
crowd would take it from his hand.

Like Sir Lancelot, in the famous eulogy of Sir Ector, these Borderers of
old were not only strong men of their hands, but strong also of heart,
and 'true friends to their friends,' who, since they held the first line
of defence of the Kingdom, might be said to embrace, after their own
family and clan, their countrymen at large. They might, on occasion,
'seek their broth in England and in Scotland both.' But they robbed and
slew, when it was possible, with patriotic discrimination. In _Johnie
Armstrong_