d by
its children because they are given so grudgingly, whose high and bleak
and stern features make the valleys they shelter the more lovely and
loved from the contrast; a race whose blood has been blended of many
strains, and tempered by long centuries of struggle with nature and with
outside enemies; perfervid of spirit and dour of will; holding with
strong grip to the things of this world, but never losing consciousness
of the nearness and mystery of the world of things invisible; with a
border-line on either side of them that for hundreds of years had to be
kept with the strong hand and the stout heart, and behind them a
background of history more charged with trouble and romance than that of
almost any other nation in Europe--where should the ballad draw pith and
sap and colour if not on such a soil and among such a people? If Mr.
Buckle was able to trace the complexion and form of Scottish religion in
the climate and configuration of Scotland, much more easily should we be
able to find the atmosphere and scenery of Scotland reflected in her
ballads.

CHAPTER II

BALLAD GROWTH AND BALLAD HISTORY

_Clown_--What hast here? ballads?

_Mopsa_--Pray now, buy some: I love a ballad in print, a' life;
for then we are sure they are true.--_Winter's Tale._

There is probably not a verse, there is scarcely a line, in the existing
body of Scottish ballad poetry that can be traced with certainty further
back than the sixteenth century. Many of them chronicle events that took
place in the seventeenth century, and there are a few that deal with
even later history. It may seem a bold thing, therefore, to claim for
these traditional tales in verse the much more venerable antiquity
implied in what has been said in the previous chapter. If we were to be
guided by the accessible literary and historical data, or even by the
language of the ballads themselves, we should be disposed to believe
that the productive period of ballad-making was confined within two or
at most three hundred years.

It would be more than rash, however, to imagine that ballads did not
live and grow and spread in the obscure but fertile ground of the
popular fancy and the popular memory, because they did not crop up in
the contemporary printed literature, and were overlooked by the
dry-as-dust chroniclers of the time. Nor is it a paradox to say that a
ballad may be older, by ages, than the hero and the deeds that it seems
to celebrate