n 1528, 'The Earl
of Argyle had bound him to ride' into the Merse by the Pass of Pease,
but was met and discomfited at 'Edgebucklin Brae.' In another, and much
earlier fragment, recording how William Douglas the 'Knight of
Liddesdale,' was met and slain by his kinsman, the Earl of Douglas, at
the spot now known as Williamshope in Ettrick Forest, after the Countess
had written letters to the doomed man 'to dissuade him from that
hunting,' we may perhaps discover a germ of _Little Musgrave_, or trace
situations and phrases that reappear in _The Douglas Tragedy_, _Gil
Morice_, and their variants.

In _Johnie Armstrong o' Gilnockie_, _The Border Widow_, and _The Sang of
the Outlaw Murray_, also--in which we should perhaps see the reflection,
in the popular mind of the day, of the efforts of James IV. and James V.
to preserve order on the Borders--it is on the side of the freebooter
rather than of the king and the law that our sympathies are enlisted.
Indeed your balladist, like Allan Breck Stewart, was never a bigoted
partisan of the law. There is ample proof in the writings of Sir David
Lyndsay and others that in the first half of the sixteenth century a
number of the Scottish ballads that have come down to us were already
current and in high favour among the people, although they have not
reached us in the shape in which they were then sung or recited.

Long before this period, however, and on both sides of the Border, the
status of the minstrel or ballad-maker--for in old times the two went
together, or rather were blent in one, like the words and music--had
suffered sad declension. There was no longer question of royal harpers
or troubadours, as Alfred the Great and as Richard the Lion Heart had
been in their hour of need; or even of bards and musicians held in high
favour and honour by king and court, like Taillefer or Blondel. 'King's
Minstrels' there were on both sides of Tweed, as is found from Exchequer
and other records. But we suspect that these were players and singers of
courtly and artificial lays. True, a poet of such genuine gifts as
Dunbar had gone to London as the 'King's singer,' and had recited verses
at a Lord Mayor's banquet that had tickled the ears of the worshipful
aldermen and livery. But these could hardly have been the natural and
spontaneous notes of the Muse of Scottish ballad poetry. The written and
printed verse of the period had got overlaid and smothered by the
flowers of ornament. As a Fr