lity,
that they reflect transparently the manners and morals of their time,
and human nature in all times. Their vast superiority, alike in truth
and in beauty, over those imitations of them that were put forward last
century as improvements upon the rude old lays, may best be seen,
perhaps, by laying the old and the new 'set' of _Sir James the Rose_
side by side, or comparing verse by verse David Mallet's much vaunted
_William and Margaret_, with the beautiful old ballad, _There came a
ghost to Marg'ret's door_. There is indeed no comparison. The changes
made are nearly all either tinsel ornaments or mutilations of the
traditional text, which an eighteenth century poetaster had sought to
dress up to please the modish taste of the period. Nothing can be more
out of key with the simple, direct, and graphic style of the Scottish
ballads, dealing with elemental emotions and the situations arising
therefrom, than a style founded on that of Pope, unless it be the style
of the modern poet and romancist of the analytical and introspective
school.

If there ever be matter of offence in the traditional ballad, it resides
in the theme and not in the handling and language. Whatever be its
faults, it never has the taint of the vulgar; it avoids the suggestive
with the same instinct with which it avoids the vapid adjective; it is
the antithesis of the modern music-hall ditty. The balladist and his men
and women speak straight to the point, and call a spade a spade.

'Ye lee, ye lee, ye leear loud,
Sae loud 's I hear ye lee,'

and

'O wae betide you, ill woman,
And an ill death may ye dee,'

are among the familiar courtesies of colloquy. In the telling of his
tale, the minstrel puts off no time in preluding or introductory
passages. In a single verse or couplet he has dashed into the middle of
his theme, and his characters are already in dramatic parley, exchanging
words like sword-thrusts. Take the opening of the immortal _Dowie Dens
of Yarrow_, where the place, time, circumstances, and actors in the
fatal quarrel are put swiftly before us in four lines:

'Late at e'en, drinking the wine,
And e'er they paid the lawin',
They set a combat them between,
To fight it e'er the dawin'.'

Or still better example, the not less famous:

'The king sits in Dunfermline tower,
Drinking the blood-red wine.
Oh, where shall I find a skeely skipper
To sail this ship o' mine.'