e than anything else, has preserved, have perished. But time
may have been more tender than we know to their thoughts and words, or
to their words and music, where these have been fitly wedded together.
It may have saved for us some thrilling image as old as the time of the
scalds, some scrap of melody which Ossian or Llywarch Hen but improved
and handed on. The law of the conservation of force holds good in the
world of poetry as well as in the physical world; and all that is
dispersed and forgotten in ancient song is not lost. It is fused into
the general stock of the nation's ideas and memories; and the richest
and purest relics of it are perhaps to be sought in the Scottish
ballads.

The chroniclers who set down, often at inordinate and wearisome length,
what was said and done in court or council or monastery did not wholly
overlook the 'gospel of green fields' sung by the contemporary
minstrels. But their notices are provokingly vague and unsatisfactory;
no happy thought ever seems to have occurred to any monkish penman that
he might earn more gratitude from posterity by collecting ballad verses
than by copying the Legends of the Saints--so little can we guess what
will be deemed of value by future ages. But in Scotland, as elsewhere,
we have reason to believe that every event that deeply moved the popular
mind gave rise to its crop of ballads, either freshly invented or worked
up out of the old ballad stock. So sharply were incidents connected with
the departure of a Scottish Princess, daughter of King Alexander III.,
to be the bride of Eric of Norway, imprinted on people's minds that,
according to Motherwell's calculation, the ballad of _Sir Patrick Spens_
preserves the very days of the week when the expedition set sail and
made the land:

'They hoisted their sails on a Mononday morn,
Wi' a' the speed they may,
And they have landed in Norawa'
Upon a Wodensday.'

But this has the fault of proving too much. The last virtue that the
ballad can claim is that of accuracy. With every desire to find proof
and confirmation in the very calendar of the antiquity of this glorious
old rhyme, one is disposed to suspect these dates to be a lucky hit; in
fact, no sounder evidence than the correct enumeration of the daughters
of George, fourth Earl of Huntly, in the old Aberdeenshire ballad:

'The Lord o' Gordon had three daughters,
Elizabeth, Margaret, and Jean,'

which has led some Northern c