fter all it is but a pastoral--has the scent
of the 'grene wode' in summer.

In sooth, the Ballad Poet was neither made nor born; he grew. The 'wild
flowers of literature' is the name that has been bestowed, with some
little air of condescension, upon the rich inheritance he has left us.
They are the purest and the strongest growth of the genius of the race
and of the soil; and though they owe little save injury and mutilation
to those who have deliberately sought to prune and trim them to please a
later taste, they are as full of vigour and sap to-day as they were in
the Ballad Age, when such poetry sprung up naturally and spontaneously.
It is probable that not one of the old ballads that have come down to us
by oral recitation is the product of a single hand; or of twenty hands.
The greater its age, and the greater its popular favour, the greater is
the number of individual memories and imaginations through which it has
been filtered, taking from each some trace of colour, some flavour of
style or character, some improving or modifying touch. The 'personal
equation' is, in the ballad, a quantity at once immense and unknown. As
in Homer's _Iliad_, the voice we hear is not that of any individual
poet, but of an age and of a people--a voice simple, almost monotonous,
in its rhythmic rise and fall, but charged with meanings multitudinous
and unutterable.

The Scottish ballads are undoubtedly, in their present form, the outcome
of a long and strenuous process of selection. In its earlier stages, the
ballad was not written down but passed from mouth to mouth. Additions,
interpolations, changes infinite must have been made in the course of
transmission and repetition. Like a hardy plant, it had the power to
spread and send down fresh roots wherever it found favourable soil; and
in its new ground it always, as we shall see, took some colour and
character from the locality, the time, and the race. Golden lines and
verses may have been shed in the passage from place to place and down
the centuries. But less of this happened, we may feel sure, than a
purging away of the dross. As a rule, what was fittest--what was truest
to nature and to human nature--survived and was perpetuated in this
evolution of the ballad. When, in the course of its progress, it
gathered to itself anything that was precious and worthy of remembrance,
then, by the very law of things, this was seized and stored in the
memories of the listeners and handed do