-are lost, or are remembered only by the antiquary; not indeed
because they were spiritual, or because they were written by worthy men
with good intent--for the Scottish Psalms, sung to their traditional
melodies, touch a still deeper chord in the natural breast than the
ballads--but because they lacked the sap of life, the beauty and the
passion of nature's own teaching, which only can give immortality to
song. There is a 'Harp of the Covenant', and in it there are piercing
wails wrung from a people almost driven frantic with suffering and
oppression. But the popular lays of the civil wars and commotions of
the seventeenth century are few in number, and singularly wanting in
those touches of grace and tenderness and kindly humour that somehow
accompany the very roughest and most trenchant of the earlier ballads,
like the bloom and fragrance that adorn the bristling thickets of the
native whin on the slopes of the Eildons or Arthur Seat. The times were
harsh and crabbed, and the song they yielded was like unto themselves.
There are ballads of the _Battle of Pentland_, of _Bothwell Brig_, of
_Killiecrankie_, and, to make a leap into another century, of
_Sheriffmuir_. But they are memorable for the passion of hatred and
scorn that is in them, rather than for their merits as poetry--for
girdings, from one side or the other, at 'cruel Claver'se' and the
red-shanked Highlandmen that slew the hope of the Covenant, or at the

'Riven hose and ragged hools,
Sour milk and girnin' gools,
Psalm beuks and cutty stools'

of Whiggery.

After a time of dearth, however, Scottish poetry began to revive; and
one of the earliest signs was the attention that began to be paid to the
anonymous ballads of the country. It is curious that the first printed
collection of them should have been almost contemporary with that
merging of the Parliaments of the two kingdoms, which, according to the
fears and beliefs of the time, was to have made an end of the
nationality and identity of the smaller and poorer of the countries. It
was in 1706--the year before the Union--that James Watson's _Serious and
Comic Scots Poems_ made their appearance, prompted, conceivably, by the
impulse to grasp at what seemed to be in danger of being lost.

Of infinitely greater importance in the history of our ballad literature
was the appearance, some eighteen years later, of Allan Ramsay's
_Evergreen_ and _Tea-Table Miscellany_. It was a fresh dawning of