manufactured as actively as at any period of her history, especially on
the Borders and in the North. It may be called, indeed, the
Moss-trooping Age, and the chief members of the Moss-trooping Cycle date
from the latter years of the sixteenth century. _The Raid of the
Reidswire_ happed in 1575; the expedition of _Jamie Telfer of the Fair
Dodhead_ is conjecturally set down for 1582; _The Lads of Wamphray_
commemorates a Dumfriesshire feud of the year 1593; while the more
famous incident sung with immortal fire and vigour in _Kinmont Willie_
took place in 1596. To the same period belong the exploits of _Dick of
the Cow_ (who had made a name for himself in London while Elizabeth was
on the throne), Archie of Ca'field, Hobbie Noble, Dickie of Dryhope, the
Laird's Jock, John o' the Side, and other 'rank reivers,' whose title to
the gallows is summed up in Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington's terse
verse on the Liddesdale thieves; and their match in spulzying and
fighting was to be found on the other side of the Esk and the Cheviot.

With the Union of the Crowns, Sir Walter Scott half sadly reminds us in
_Nigel_, one stream of Scottish romance and song ran dry; the end of the
Kingdom became the middle of it; and as his namesake, Scott of Satchells
puts it, the noble freebooter was degraded to be a common thief. But
even the Reformation and the Union did not wipe out original sin or
alter human nature. The kingdoms might have outwardly composed their
quarrels; but private feuds remained, and even the Martyrs and the
Covenanters had their relapses, and loved and sang and slew under the
impulse of earthly passion. _The Dowie Dens o' Yarrow_--perhaps the
most moving and most famous of the Scottish ballads--is supposed to have
sprung, in its present shape at least, out of a tragic passage that
occurred by that stream of sorrow so late as 1616.

Away in the North, what we may call the ballad-yielding age, if it came
later and had a less brilliant flowering time, endured longer. They had
a fighting 'Border' there that lasted until the '45. The Gordons, of
their own hand, have furnished a ballad literature as rich, if not quite
so choice, as that of the Douglases themselves. _Glenlogie_ and
_Geordie_ were of the 'gay Gordons,' and had the 'sprightly turn' that
is held to be an inheritance of the race. _Edom o' Gordon_--Adam of
Auchindoun--did his ruthless work in 1571. It was in one of their
interminable quarrels, begun on the fart