the hero of the cycle of song that commemorates the
last romantic episode in our domestic annals. Jacobite poetry has been
lyrical for the most part. But the ballad--narrative in form and
dramatic in spirit--has not been neglected.

In a host of singers, Caroline Oliphant, Baroness Nairne, wears the
laurel crown of the Jacobite Muse, and Strathearn is the chief centre of
inspiration. But the authoress of _The Auld Hoose_, and _The Land o' the
Leal_, also wrote ballads of cheery and pawky, yet 'genty' humour that
have caught and held the popular ear, as witness the immortal _Laird of
Cockpen_. Hamilton of Bangour, who was 'out' in the '45, had struck anew
the lyre of Yarrow in _Busk ye, busk ye!_ Fife could already 'cock her
crest' over Elizabeth Halkett, Lady Wardlaw, a balladist whose verse,
acknowledged and unacknowledged, had many genuine touches 'of the
antique manner;' and Lady Anne Barnard, a granddaughter of Colin, Earl
of Balcarres, whose career was one of the romances of the '15 and of the
House of Lindsay, was able to tell Sir Walter Scott, so late as 1823,
the story of the conception and birth of her _Auld Robin Gray_, which
also, on its first anonymous appearance, was taken by some as 'a very,
very ancient ballad, composed perhaps by David Rizzio.' As with so many
other ballads--perhaps as with most of them--the inspiration of the
words was caught from a beautiful and still older air--'an ancient
Scotch melody,' says Lady Anne, 'of which I was passionately fond; Sophy
Johnstone used to sing it to us at Balcarres.' The date of this, perhaps
the sweetest of our modern ballads, is fixed approximately by the gifted
writer 'as soon after the close of the year 1771'--perhaps the first
approach that can be made to the timing a ballad's birth.

Walter Scott, also, was born in the latter half of 1771. Burns was then
fifteen years of age, 'beardless, young, and blate,' but already, as he
wrote to the 'guidwife of Wauchope-house,' with

'The elements o' sang
In formless jumble right an' wrang
Wild floating in his brain.'

Already the wish was 'strongly heaving the breast' of that young
Ayrshire ploughman,

'That I, for poor auld Scotland's sake
Some usefu' plan or beuk could make,
Or sing a sang at least.'

Galloway had by this time taken up again its rough old lyre. Away in the
North--in the Mearns and in Buchan, old homes of the ballad--the
Reverend John Skinner had written his gen