and neither lovit hunger nor
cauld,' and who fancied that he could more easily play the housewife's
part:

'Then to the kirn that he did stour,
And jumbled at it till he swat;
When he had jumblit ane lang hour,
The sorrow crap of butter he gat.

Albeit nae butter he could get,
Yet he was cumbered wi' the kirn;
And syne he het the milk ower het,
That sorrow spark o' it wad yearn.'

Of the same racy domestic type are the still popular, _The Barrin' o'
the Door, Hame cam' oor Guidman at e'en_, to which, with needless
ingenuity, it has been sought to give a Jacobite significance, and
_Allan o' Maut_, an allegorical account of the genesis of 'barley bree.'
Of this last, also, Bannatyne has noted a version which was probably in
vogue in the first half of the sixteenth century. Even the hand of
Burns, who has produced, in _John Barleycorn_, the final form of the
ballad, could not give us more vigorous and trenchant Scots than is
contained in the verses of this venerable rhyme in Jamieson's
collection:

'He first grew green, syne grew he white,
Syne a' men thocht that he was ripe;
And wi' crookit gullies and hafts o' tree,
They 've hew'd him down, right dochtilie.

. . . . .

The hollin souples, that were sae snell,
His back they loundert, mell for mell,
Mell for mell, and baff for baff,
Till his hide flew round his lugs like chaff.'

Three (if not four) generations of the Semples of Beltrees carried the
tradition of this homely type of native poetry, with its strong gust and
relish of life, and the Dutch-like breadth and fidelity of its pictures
of the character and humours of common folk, over the period from the
Scottish Reformation to the Revolution; and are remembered by such
pieces as _The Packman's Paternoster_, _The Piper o' Kilbarchan_, _The
Blithesome Bridal_, and, best and most characteristic of all, _Maggie
Lauder_.

The 'business of the Reformation of Religion' did not go well with
ballad-making or with the roystering fun of the fair and the play. In
the stern temper to which the nation was wrought in the struggle to cast
out abuses in the faith and practice of the Church and to assert liberty
of judgment, the feigned adventures of knights and the sorrows of
love-crossed maids seemed to cease for a time to exercise their spell
over the fancy of the people. The open-air gatherings and junketings