Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847

In rapid round the Baron bent;
He sighed a sigh, and pray'd a prayer;
The prayer was to his patron saint—
The sigh was to his ladye fair.
Stout Deloraine nor sigh'd nor pray'd,
Nor saint nor ladye called to aid;
But he stoop'd his head, and couch'd his spear,
And spurr'd his stead to full career.
The meeting of these champions proud
Seem'd like the bursting thunder-cloud."

This, you observe, is practical eloquence,—the perfect pantomime of rhetoric; and, when your eyes have recovered the dazzling shock of the encounter, you shall see William of Deloraine lying on the green sward, with the Baron's spear-head sunk a foot within his bosom. Nothing, in short, can be more conclusive or satisfactory.

Let us now take an instance to the contrary. Few men have written with more fire and energy than Mr Macaulay; and, in the heart of a battle, he handles his falchion like a Legionary. Still, every now and then, the rhetorician peeps out in spite of himself, and he goes through the catalogue of the topics. Nothing can be better or more ballad-like than the blunt declaration by Horatius of his readiness to keep the bridge:—

"Then out spoke bold Horatius,
The captain of the gate:
'To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late;
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods?'"

Not one other word should stout old Cocles have uttered, of apology for claiming to himself the post of danger and of death. No higher motive need he have assigned than those contained in the last two lines, which must have gone home at once to the heart of every Roman. But the poet will not leave him there. He interpolates another stanza, which has the effect of diluting the strength of the passage.

"'And for the tender mother
Who dandled him to rest,
And for the wife who nurses
Her baby at her breast;
And for the holy maidens
Who feed the eternal flame,
To save them from false Sextus
That wrought the deed of shame?'"

The whole of this stanza is bad;—the last four lines of it simply and purely execrable. Mr Macaulay is far too judicious a critic not to be fully aware of the danger of any weak passage in a short poem of incident; and we trust, in the next edition, to see this palpable eye-sore removed. But it is in the ballad of Virginia that his besetting tendency towards declamation becomes most thoroughly apparent. You are to suppose yourself in the market-place of Rome;—the lictors of Claudius have seized upon the daughter of the centurion; the people have risen in wrath at the outrage; and, for a moment, there is hope of deliverance. But the name of the decemvir still carries terror with it, and the commons waver at the sound. In this crisis, Icilius, the betrothed of the virgin, appears, and delivers a long essay of some fifty double lines, upon the spirit and tendency of the Roman constitution. This is a great error. Speeches, when delivered in the midst of a popular tumult, must be pithy in order to be effective: nor was Appius such an ass as to have lost the opportunity afforded him by this dialectic display, of effectually securing his captive.

There is no literary legacy the people of Scotland ought to be so thankful as for their rich inheritance of national ballads. In this respect they stand quite unrivalled in Europe; for, although the Scandinavian peninsula has a glorious garland of its own, and Spain and England are both rich in traditionary story, our northern ballad poetry is wider in its compass, and far more varied in the composition of its material. The high and heroic war-chant, the deeds of chivalrous emprise, the tale of unhappy love, the mystic songs of fairy-land,—all have been handed down to us, for centuries, unmutilated and unchanged, in a profusion which is almost marvellous, when we reflect upon the great historic changes and revolutions which have agitated the country. For such changes, though tending essentially towards the production of the ballad, especially in the historical department, cannot possibly be favourable to its preservation; and no stronger proof of the intense nationality of the people of Scotland can be found than this—that the songs commemorative of our earlier heroes have outlived the Reformation, the union of the two crowns, the civil and religious wars of the revolution, and the subsequent union of the kingdoms; and, at a comparatively late period, were collected from the oral traditions of the peasantry. Time had it not in its power to chill the memories which lay warm at the nation's heart, or to efface the noble annals of its long and eventful history. There is a spell of potency still in the names of the Bruce and the Douglas.

By whom those ballads were written, is a question beyond solution. A large portion of them were, we know, composed long before the Press was in existence—some, probably, may date so far back as the reign of Alexander the Third—and to their own intrinsic merit are they indebted for preservation. But we are in ignorance of the authorship even of those which are much nearer to our own immediate period. Much of the Jacobite minstrelsy, and of the songs commemorative, of the Fifteen and the Forty-five, is anonymous; and we cannot tell whether those ditties, which have still the power to thrill our hearts so strangely, were written by gentle or by simple, in the hall or by the cottage fire. After all, it matters not. The poet of Otterbourne will be greater without a name, than fifty modern versifiers whom it would be odious to particularise, notwithstanding the blazon of their Christian and patronymic prefix. Better to live for ever innominate in a song, than to be quoted for a life-time by one's friends, as a self-marked and immolated driveller.

"Give me," said Fletcher of Saltoun, "the making of a nation's ballads, and I will let you make its laws." This was, in our opinion, a speech of considerable boldness; and if Fletcher really made it, he must have had a high estimate of his own poetical powers. Why then, in the name of Orpheus, did he not set about it incontinently? We presume that there was nothing whatever to have prevented him from concocting as many ballads as he chose; or from engaging, as engines of popular promulgation, the ancestors of those unshaven and raucous gentlemen, to whose canorous mercies we are wont, in times of political excitement, to intrust our own personal and patriotic ditties. Seldom, indeed, have we experienced a keener sense of our true greatness as a poet, than when we encountered, on one occasion, a peripatetic minstrel, deafening the Canongate with the notes of our particular music, and surrounded by an eager crowd demanding the halfpenny broadsheet. "This is fame!" we exclaimed to a legal friend who was beside us; and, with a glow of triumph on our countenance, we descended the North Bridge, to indite another of the same. Notwithstanding this, we cannot aver from experience that our ballads have wrought any marked effect in modifying the laws of the country. We cannot even go the length of asserting that they have once turned an election; and therefore it is not unnatural that we should regard the dogma of Fletcher with distrust. The truth is, that a nation is the maker of its own ballads. You cannot by any possibility contrive to sway people from their purpose by a song; but songs—ballads especially—are the imperishable records of their purpose. And therefore it is that they survive, because they are real and not ideal. It is no feigned passion which they convey, but the actual reflex of that which has arisen, and wrought, and expended itself; and each historical ballad is, in fact, a memorial of a national impulse; and wo be to the man who would attempt to illustrate the past, if he cannot again create within himself the sympathies and the motives which led to the deeds he must celebrate. Wo be to him, we say—for as sure as there is truth in the retributive justice of posterity, he will attain an eminent position, not in the roll of beatified bards, but in that of the British blockheads, and be elected by unanimous consent as a proper Laureate for the Fogie Club.

It is now a good many years since Sir Walter Scott compiled his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. Previous to the publication of that work, several excellent collections of the older Scottish ballads had been made, and industrious gleaners have since gathered up every stray traditionary ear of corn which still lay unnoticed in the furrow. Our excellent friend Robert Chambers, availing himself of all these labours, has given, in a popular form, the essence and spirit of the whole; nor does there, we believe, exist a single fragment of the least merit which has escaped so rigorous a search. We understood that the English ballads had long ago been collected. These were neither so numerous nor so romantic as ours; but they had fallen at a much earlier date into the hands of the antiquaries, and we hardly expected in our day to be told of a considerable addition. Therefore it was with no little astonishment, and some curiosity, that we perused the announcement of a new work entitled, "The Minstrelsy of the English Border; being a collection of ballads, ancient, remodelled, and original—founded on well-known Border legends. With illustrative notes by Frederick Sheldon."

Predisposed though we certainly were to do every justice to the original strains of Mr Sheldon, he will forgive us when we own that the ancient ballads were the primary objects of our quest. We were eager to discover what kind of materials—what snatches of antique song, he had rescued from oblivion among the wild moors of Northumberland; and his preface gave us ample hope of the choice nature of his budget.

"No doubt," says Mr Sheldon, alluding to Sir Walter's literary researches upon the Border—"no doubt many ballads did escape, and still remain scattered up and down the country side, existing, probably, in the recollection of many a sun-browned shepherd, or the weather-beaten brains of ancient hinds, or 'eldern' women; or in the well-thumbed and nearly illegible leaves of some old book or pamphlet of songs, snugly resting on the 'pot-head,' or sharing their rest with the 'great ha' bible,' 'Scott's Worthies,' or 'Blind Harry's' lines. The parish dominie, or pastor of some obscure village amid the many nooks and corners of the Borders, possesses, no doubt, treasures in the ballad ware, that would have gladdened the heart of a Ritson, a Percy, or a Surtees; in the libraries, too, of many an ancient descendant of a Border family, some black-lettered volume of ballads doubtlessly slumbers in hallowed and unbroken dust. From such sources I have obtained many of the ballads in the present collection. Those to which I have stood godfather, and so baptised and remodelled, I have mostly met with in the 'broadside' ballads, as they are called; but notwithstanding their fire and pathos, I found so much obscenity and libertinism mingled with their beauties, that I was compelled with a rash hand to pluck the nettles away that choked the healthy growth of the young, fresh, and budding flowers; preserving, as nearly as I could, their ancient simplicity and diction. Others, by local and nameless poets, I have given as I found them. Those ballads, virtually my own, are stated to be so in the notes, and these, with great fear and tribulation, I hang as a votive wreath on the altar of the Muses." This is explicit and satisfactory, and we shall now proceed to see how our author has redeemed his promise.

We have read every one of the thirty-seven ballads contained in this volume, and the following is our synoptical view. Of "original" ballads—by which Mr Sheldon means those which must be attributed to his own inspired pen, and which constitute, as aforesaid, his votive wreath—there are no less than thirteen; four ballads are taken from the works of Messrs Mackay, Wilson, Telfer, and Hall—bards who have flourished during the last twenty years upon the Border; four are "remodelled" by Mr Sheldon; and sixteen, having no other distinguishing mark upon them, must be set down as "ancient" compositions. The man who can bestow upon us at the present time sixteen authentic and hitherto unknown ballads, is indeed a public benefactor!

Out of courtesy to Mr Sheldon, we shall, in the first instance, dispose of his own particular garland; and as it would be a pity to dismember such a posy, we shall merely lay before our readers the following morceau from the ballad of "Seton's Sons."

"Seton he gaspit and he girn'd,
And showed his teeth sae whyte,
His een were glaikit like a man's
That's strycken wi' affryghte.

Quo' he, 'Lorde Percy, dinna think
I speak your lugs to blaw;
But let him spare my twa brave sonnes
And at his feet I'll fa!

'And wat them wi' these happing tears
That wash my auld, auld een,—
That channel down these wrynkelets,
Gin he will list bedeen.'

'My bairnies,' quo' the mother then,
'That I have kist sae aft,
Canna we save them frae their death,
But sic a pryce we coft?

'Thare pretty necks I've slibbered sae
Ah! Percy, gentil lord,
To hae them raxed upon a tree,
And strangled wi' a cord!'"

Admirers of the ancient ballad—what do you say to that? There is the fine old Scots dialect in all its purity with a vengeance! In what part of the island such a jargon is spoken, we are fortunately at present unaware. Certain we are that our fathers never heard it; and as for ourselves, though reasonably cognizant of the varieties of speech which are current in Gilmerton, Aberdeen, the Crosscauseway and the Gorbals, we protest that we never yet met with any thing so cacophonous as this. It is impossible, however, to deny Mr Sheldon the merit of pure originality. Nobody but himself could have written the first glorious stanza, which embodies so perfect a picture of despair, or the second, in which the old familiar phrase of "blawing intill his lug" is so appositely adapted to verse, and put into the mouth of a knightly Scottish commander. Lady Seton, too, is exquisite in her way. The "slibbering" reminiscence—which, we presume, is equivalent to slobbering—is one of those natural touches which, once uttered, can never be forgotten.

It will, we opine, be sufficient to quench the curiosity of our readers, when we state that the above is a fair average specimen of Mr Sheldon's original productions. We presume that few will thirst for another draught from this pitcherful of the Border Helicon; and—as time presses—we shall now push forward to the consideration of the remodelled poetry. The first of these is called "Halidon Hill," and, as we are informed in the notes, it dates back to the respectable antiquity of 1827. The following magnificent stanzas will convey some idea of the spirit and style of that production.

Glower'd the Scot down on his foe:
'Ye coof, I cam not here to ride;
But syne it is so, give me a horse,
I'll curry thee thine English hide.'

Quod Benhal, 'I cam to fight a man
And not a blude mastyff,—
Were ye a man and no a pup,
Saint Bride I had as lief.'

'Foam not, or fret, thou baby knicht,
Put some food in thy wame,
For thou art but the champion
Of some fond Norfolk dame.

'My dog shall shake thy silken hide,
Thy brainis prove his fee,
Gif in that bagie skull of thine