heir
tippets, hoods, and curches. Not only Peebles, but

'Hop-Kailzie, and Cardronow,
Gaderit out thick-fald,
With "Hey and how rohumbelow"
The young folk were full bald.
The bag-pipe blew, and they out-threw
Out of the townis untald,
Lord, what a shout was them amang
Quhen thai were ower the wald
Their west
Of Peblis to the play!'

From a phrase used by John Major, it has been suggested that James I. of
Scots was the writer of this poem; and a note on the Bannatyne MS. of
_Christ's Kirk_ attributes that companion poem to the same royal
authorship. In spite of the adverse judgment pronounced by Professors
Guest and Skeat, it does not seem an inconceivable thing that the
monarch who wrote the _King's Quair_, and whose daughter kissed the
lips of Alain Chartier as the reward of France for his sweet singing,
should have written these strains descriptive of rural jollity in
localities where the court and sovereign are known to have often
resorted for hunting and other diversion. The cast and language of the
poems appear, however, to belong to a later date; and the quaint stanza,
afterwards employed in a modified form with such effect by Fergusson and
Burns, is that used by Alexander Scot in _The Justing at the Drum_, and
in other burlesque pieces of the early or middle period of the sixteenth
century.

A much more taking tradition is that which assigns them to the
adventure-loving 'Commons King,' James V. They are thoroughly after the
'humour'--using the word in the Elizabethan as well as in the ordinary
sense--of the wandering 'Red Tod'; who has also been held to be the
inspirer, if not the author, of those excellent humorous ballads--among
the best of their kind to be found in any language--_The Gaberlunzie
Man_ and _The Jolly Beggar_.

From the moral point of view, these pieces may, perhaps, come under
Spenser's condemnation of the rhymers who sing of amatory adventures in
which love is no sooner asked than it is granted. But the balladist
carries everything before him by the verve and good humour and pawky wit
of his song. There are touches worthy of the comedy spirit of Moliere in
the description, in _The Gaberlunzie Man_, of the good-wife's alternate
blessing and banning as she makes her morning discoveries about the
'silly poor man' whom she has lodged over night:

'She gaed to the bed whair the beggar lay;
The strae was cauld, he