ial songs of _Tullochgorum_,
_The Ewie wi' the Crookit Horn_ and the rest, that seem to thrill with
the piercing and stirring notes of fiddle and pipes, being moved
thereto, as he has told us, by his daughters, 'who, being all good
singers, plagued me for words to their favourite tunes.' Fergusson was
celebrating, in an old stanza, shortly to be made world-famous, the high
jinks on Leith Links. Everywhere, from the Moray Firth to the Cheviots,
and from the East Neuk of Fife to Maidenkirk, there were preludings for
the new and splendid burst of Scottish song, that by and by broke from
the banks of Ayr and Doon. The service rendered by the genius of Burns
in quickening and purifying Scottish song and ballad poetry has often
been acknowledged. It was, indeed, beyond all measure and praise. But
recognition, has not, perhaps, been made so fully and frequently of what
our 'King of Song' owed to the popular poetry of country people and
elder times--and notably to the ballads--that have been handed down by
memory rather than books. His was not an isolated phenomenon, blazing up
meteor-like without visible cause or prompting. His poetry is rather the
culminating effect of an impulse that had been making itself felt for
generations. It was like one of those grand bale-fires of the days of
peril and watching, whose sudden gleam made the blood stir in the veins,
and turned men's faces skywards, but which caught its message from
distant points of light that to us seem almost swallowed in the
surrounding darkness.

Burns had an inimitable ear for ballad feeling and for ballad rhythm and
music. But, except for some vigorous satiric, political, and
bacchanalian chants of his own, and the recasting of a few of the
old-fashioned and lively rhymes like _The Carl o' Kellyburn Braes_ that
were not out of the need of being cleaned and furbished to please a more
fastidious age, he could scarcely be called a ballad writer. His special
sphere in the restoration and preservation of the old was in lyrical
poetry. What Robert Burns achieved for the songs, however, Walter Scott
did for the ballads and prose legends of Scotland. The appearance of the
_Border Minstrelsy_ makes 1802 the red-letter year in the later annals
of the Scottish Ballad. More than twenty years before, the little lame
boy, with the good blood of two Border clans, the Scotts and the
Rutherfords, in his veins, had lain on the braes of Sandyknowe, and had
drunk in through all his