without receiving their rich reward and
testifying their gratitude by fresh gifts of song and story, fresh
harpings on the old lyre that moved the hearts of men to tears and
laughter long before they knew of printed books. The old wellspring of
music and poetry is still open to all, and has lost none of the old
power of thrilling and enthralling; and the present is a time when a
long and deep draught from the Scottish ballads seems specially required
for the healing of a sick literature.

CHAPTER IV

THE MYTHOLOGICAL BALLAD

'Oh see ye not that bonnie road
That winds about yon fernie brae?
Oh that 's the road to fair Elfland
Where you and I this day maun gae.'

_Thomas the Rhymer._

No scheme of ballad classification can be at all points complete and
satisfactory. We have seen that it is impossible to classify the
Scottish ballads according to authorship, since authors, known and
proved, there are none. Scarce more practicable is it to arrange them in
any regular order of chronology or locality; and even when we seek to
group them with regard to type and subject, difficulties start up at
every step. A convenient and intelligible division would seem to be one
that recognised the ballads as Mythological, Romantic, or Historical,
this last class including the lays of the foray and the chase, that
cannot be assigned to any particular date--that cannot, indeed, be
proved to have any historical basis at all--but can yet, with more or
less of probability, be assigned to some historical or _quasi_-historical
character. Besides these, there are groups of ballads that cannot be
wholly overlooked--ballads in which, contrary to the prevailing spirit
of this kind of poetry, Humour asserts itself as an essential element;
ballads of the Sea; and Peasant ballads, of which, perhaps, England
yields happier examples than Scotland--simple rustic ditties, hawked
about in broad-sheets, and dating, many of them, no earlier than the
present century, that seldom rise much above the doggerel and
commonplace, and do not, as a rule, concern themselves with the high
personages and high-strung passions of the ballad of Old Romance.

No well-defined frontier can be laid down between the three chief
departments of ballad minstrelsy. The pieces in which fairy-lore and
ancient superstition have a prominent place--the ballads of Myth and
Marvel--have all of them a strong romantic colouring; and the like may
be