on
feast and saints' days, with their attendant mirth and music, were too
closely associated with the old ecclesiastical rule, and had too many
scandals and excesses connected with them, to escape censure from the
new Mentors and conscience-keepers of the nation. When, a little later,
the spirit of Puritanism came in, mirth and music, and more particularly
the dance, became themselves suspect. They savoured of the follies of
this world, and were among the wiles most in use by the Wicked One in
snaring souls. The flowers were cut down along with the weeds by those
root-and-branch men--only to spring up again, both of them, in due
season, more luxuriantly than ever.

There were other and cogent reasons why the exploits of 'Jock o' the
Side' and his confreres should be frowned upon and listened to with
impatience. The time for Border feud and skirmish was already well-nigh
past. Industry and knowledge and the pacific arts of life were making
progress. The moss-trooper was already becoming an anachronism and a
pestilent nuisance, to be put down by the relentless arm of the law,
before the Union of the Crowns. Half a century or more before that
event, this opinion had been formed of the reiving clans by their
quieter and more thoughtful neighbours, as is manifest from the biting
allusions of Sir David Lyndsay and Sir Richard Maitland. But after King
James's going to England, even the balladists were chary of lifting up a
voice in praise of the freebooters of the former Marches. Men were busy
finding and fitting themselves to new ideals of patriotism and duty. The
gift and the taste for ballad poetry disappeared, or rather went into
retirement for a time, to reappear in other forms at a later call of
loyalty and romanticism.

The _Gude and Godlie Ballates_ of the Wedderburns had been deliberately
produced and circulated by the Reformers, with the avowed intention, as
Sheriff Mackay says, of 'driving the old amatory and romantic ballads
out of the field, and substituting spiritual songs, set to the same
tunes--much as revivalists of the present day have adopted older secular
melodies.' But nothing enduring is to be done, in the field of poetry,
by mere dint of determination and good intent. If the older songs
succumbed for a time to the new spiritual melodies, we may feel sure
that it was not without a struggle. On the Borders and in the Highlands,
the Original Adam asserted himself, in deed and in song, long after the
more