e
ballad-spirit, than the 'wan water,' the 'bent sae brown,' the 'lee
licht o' the mune'? When the knight rides forth to see his true love, he
mounts on his 'berry brown steed,' and 'fares o'er dale and down,' until
he comes to the castle wa', where the lady sits 'sewing her silken
seam.' He kisses her 'cheek and chin,' and she 'kilts her green kirtle,'
and follows him; but not so fast as to outrun fate. In the oldest set
of _The Battle of Otterburn_, alliteration asserts itself:

'The rae full reckless there sche runnes
To make the game and glee.'

It is but seldom that the balladist avails himself so freely of the
'artful aid' of this device as in _Johnie o' Braidislee_, the vigorous
hunting lay that was a favourite with Carlyle's mother:

'Won up, won up, my good grey dogs,
Won up and be unboun';
For we maun awa' to Bride's braid wood,
To ding the dun deer doun, doun,
To ding the dun deer doun.'

The words that have had the best chance of coming down to us intact on
the stream of ballad-verse, or with only such marks of attrition and
wear as might be caused by time and a rough channel, are those to which
the popular mind of a later day has been unable to attach any definite
meaning; for instance, certain names of places and houses, titles and
functions, snatches of refrains, phrases reminiscent of otherwise
forgotten primaeval or mediaeval customs and the like. These remain bedded
like fossils in the more recent deposits, and form a curious study, for
those who have time to enter into it, in the archaeology and palaeontology
of the ballad. _Childe Rowland_, _Hynde Horn_, _Kempion_, furnish us
with words, drawn from the language of Gothic and Norman chivalry, that
must have dropped out of the common speech long before the ballads began
to be regularly collected and printed. They recall the gentleness and
courtesy, as well as the courage, that were supposed to be attributes of
the 'most perfect goodly knight'--attributes in which, sooth to say, the
typical knight of the Scottish ballad is not always a pattern.
_Kempion_--'Kaempe' or Champion Owayne--is supposed to perpetuate the
name of 'Owain-ap-Urien, King of Reged,' celebrated by Taliessin and the
other early Welsh bards. And this is by no means the only instance in
which ballads appear to have distilled the spirit and blended names and
stories out of both Celtic and Teutonic legend. Thus _Glasgerion_, which
in the