Scottish poetry. Warmth, light, and freedom seemed to come again into
the frozen world. The blithe and genial spirit of the black-avised
little barber-poet was itself the greatest imaginable contrast to the
soured Puritanism and prim formalism that for half a century and more
had infested the national letters. But the author of _The Gentle
Shepherd_ himself--and small blame to him--did not fully comprehend the
nature and extent of his mission. He did not wholly rid himself from the
prevalent idea that the simple natural turn of the old verse was naked
rudeness which it was but decent and charitable to deck with the
ornaments of the time before it could be made presentable in polite
society; indeed he himself, in later editions especially, tried his hand
boldly at emendation, imitation, and continuation.

For a generation or two longer, the ballad suffered from these
attentions of the modish muse. Yet the original spark of inspiration was
not extinct; in the Border valleys especially--its native country, as
we have called it--there were strains that 'bespoke the harp of ancient
days.' Of Lady Grizel Baillie's lilts, composed at 'Polwarth on the
Green' or at Mellerstain--classic scenes of song and of legend, both of
them--mention has been made; they have on them the very dew of homely
shepherd life, closed about by the hills, of 'forest charms decayed and
pastoral melancholy.' The Wandering Violer, also, 'Minstrel Burne,' from
whom Scott may have taken the hint of the 'last of all the bards who
sang of Border chivalry'--caught an echo, in _Leader Haughs_, of the
grief and changes 'which fleeting Time procureth.'

'For many a place stands in hard case
Where blyth folks ken'd nae sorrow,
With Humes that dwelt on Leaderside,
And Scotts that wonned in Yarrow.'

His song, with its notes of native sweetness and its artificial
garnishing of classic allusions, marks the passing of the old ballad
style into the new.

Jane Elliot, too, a descendant of that Gibbie Elliot--'the laird of
Stobs, I mean the same'--who refused to come to the succour of Telfer's
kye, listened to the murmuring of the 'mining Rule' and looked up
towards the dark skirt and threatening top of Ruberslaw, as she crooned
the old fragment which her fancy shaped into that lilting before
daybreak of the lasses at the ewe-milking, turned ere night into wailing
for the lost Flowers of the Forest. Her contemporary, Mrs. Cockburn,
who wrote the