byre and the plough-tail; yours is that large utterance of the early
hinds. Even Theocritus minces matters, save where Lacon and Comatas
quite outdo the swains of Ayrshire. 'But thee, Theocritus, wha matches?'
you ask, and yourself out-match him in this wide rude region, trodden
only by the rural Muse.

'_Thy_ rural loves are nature's sel';' and the wooer of Jean Armour
speaks more like a true shepherd than the elegant Daphnis of the
'Oaristys.'

Indeed it is with this that moral critics of your life reproach you,
forgetting, perhaps, that in your amours you were but as other Scotch
ploughmen and shepherds of the past and present. Ettrick may still, with
Afghanistan, offer matter for idylls, as Mr. Carlyle (your antithesis,
and the complement of the Scotch character) supposed; but the morals of
Ettrick are those of rural Sicily in old days, or of Mossgiel in your
days. Over these matters the Kirk, with all her power, and the Free Kirk
too, have had absolutely no influence whatever. To leave so delicate a
topic, you were but as other swains, or, as 'that Birkie ca'd a lord,'
Lord Byron; only you combined (in certain of your letters) a libertine
theory with your practice; you poured out in song your audacious
raptures, your half-hearted repentance, your shame and your scorn. You
spoke the truth about rural lives and loves. We may like it or dislike
it; but we cannot deny the verity.

Was it not as unhappy a thing, Sir, for you, as it was fortunate for
Letters and for Scotland, that you were born at the meeting of two ages
and of two worlds--precisely in the moment when bookish literature was
beginning to reach the people, and when Society was first learning to
admit the low-born to her Minor Mysteries? Before you how many singers
not less truly poets than yourself--though less versatile not less
passionate, though less sensuous not less simple--had been born and had
died in poor men's cottages! There abides not even the shadow of a name
of the old Scotch song-smiths, of the old ballad-makers. The authors of
'Clerk Saunders,' of 'The Wife of Usher's Well,' of 'Fair Annie,' and
'Sir Patrick Spens,' and 'The Bonny Hind,' are as unknown to us as
Homer, whom in their directness and force they resemble. They never,
perhaps, gave their poems to writing; certainly they never gave them to
the press. On the lips and in the hearts of the people they have their
lives; and the singers, after a life obscure and untroubled by society