to explore. On the whole it can hardly be
regretted that our ballad collections bear the impress of the
idiosyncrasies of the individual ballad-hunters, as well as of the game
they pursued and the district they coursed over.

Scott made his bag, as he tells us, chiefly 'during his early youth,'
among 'the shepherds and aged persons in the recesses of the Border
mountains,' who 'remembered and repeated the warlike songs of their
fathers.' They were gathered on those long pedestrian excursions, with
Shortreed or with Leyden (himself a balladist), which were themselves
often as full of incident, and of the seeds of future romance, as any
old Border raid. The great Master of Romance was, as one of his
companions said, 'makin' himsel' a' the time.' Dandie Dinmont, whom the
author of _Guy Mannering_ sketches from the traits of a dozen honest
yeomen and store farmers, whose hospitality he had shared in his rambles
through the wilds of Liddesdale, would a few generations earlier have
been a stark moss-trooper, ready to ride to the rescue of Kinmont Willie
or to seek his 'beef and kail' in the Merse. The raid on Habbie Elliot
of the Heughfoot is but a 'variant' of the lifting of Telfer's kye; and
_Wandering Willie's Tale_, if it had been cast in verse, would have been
the pick of our ballads of 'glamourie,' instead of the choicest of short
prose stories. The rhyme and air that haunted the memory of Henry
Bertram--what are they but an echo out of Scott's own romantic
youth--out of the enchanted land of ballad poetry?

'"Are these the Links of Forth," she said,
"Or are they the crooks of Dee,
Or the bonnie woods o' Warroch-head
That I so fain would see?"'

It was on one of these excursions up Ettrick that Scott forgathered with
Margaret Laidlaw, the mother of the 'Shepherd,' and the repository of an
inexhaustible store of fairy tales, songs and ballads, which, as she
declared, the compiler of the _Border Minstrelsy_ 'spoiled' by
transmitting to print. But the richest and rarest of his 'finds' was
Hogg himself. He was nursed in the lap of the Forest and cradled in
ballad and fairy lore. Here was the 'heart of pathos' of the older
poetry; the head buzzing with its wild fancies; 'the sang o' the linty
amang the broom in the spring'; and along with these the shaggy front,
the strong hand-grips, the loyalty, and the sturdy sense that are the
far-descended inheritance of the Border farmer and shepherd. Surely, to