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

But Jock cam' to questions, and being a fallow
Stout, buirdly and sonsy, he soon pleased her taste,
And awa' went the twasome, haup-jaup in their daffin',
Thro' wynds and blind alleys no time for to waste."

Ancient ballad indeed! the minstrel who would venture to chant such a ditty in the Cowgate, would be cheaply let off with a month's solitary imprisonment on a diet of bread and water.

We pass with pleasure from this medley of balderdash and drivel to the more sober tome of Mr Collier, because we know that whatever he gives us will at least have the merit of being genuine. Out of the thousand black-letter broadsides which constitute the Roxburghe collection, the editor has selected upwards of fifty, and thus states the object of their publication:—"The main purpose of the ensuing collection is to show, in their most genuine state, the character and quality of productions written expressly for the amusement of the lower orders, in the reign of Elizabeth, James, and Charles. Our volume consists of such ordinary materials as formed the stock of the English ballad-singer, during a period not far short of a century. Many traces will be found in them of the modes in which they were rendered acceptable to the crowd, when sung in our most frequented thoroughfares." We need hardly say that the volume is got up with great care; and it will doubtless be an acceptable addition to the libraries of our literary epicures: nevertheless, we are free to confess that we were somewhat disappointed with its contents. We did not, it is true, expect to find, in this quarto, any new historical, or even romantic ballads of the first or highest class. The literature of Elizabeth and James is remarkably sterile in productions of this nature; and the few which are intrinsically excellent have long since become familiar and have lost the gloss of novelty. But the didactic ballad and the canzonet were then extensively practised, and, with the fugitive poetry of Peele, Marlowe, Greene, and Lodge in our recollection, we had hoped to recover some valuable specimens of their more obscure contemporaries. In the voluminous records of the Elizabethan era, we find mention of many poets who enjoyed a reasonable celebrity at the time, but whose works, devoid of buoyancy, have since settled into oblivion. We find the names of some of these persons, such as Thomas Churchyard, who is spoken of in "The Return from Parnassus," attached to poems in Mr Collier's collection; but we are compelled on perusal to acknowledge that there is much justice in the critical decrees of time, and that very little which is at all worthy of preservation has been silently permitted to perish. In an æsthetical point of view, therefore, we cannot expect to derive much advantage from this reprint of the Roxburghe broadsides. But the antiquary, who has a natural taste for the cast-off raiment of the world, will doubtless fasten upon the volume; and the critical commentator may glean from it some scraps of obsolete information. To them accordingly we leave it, and pass into the glades of Sherwood.

We wonder whether "Robin Hood, that archer good," is as great a favourite in the nursery now as he was in our younger days? We are afraid not. Our Robin was a mysterious sort of personage, something between an outlaw and an earl,—a kind of Judge Lynch, who distributed arbitrary justice beneath the shade of an enormous oak-tree, and who was perpetually confiscating the moveables of abbots for the exclusive benefit of the poor. Maid Marian we could never distinctly realise. Sometimes she appeared to us as a soft flaxen-haired beauty, not unlike a lay-figure, once the property of Mr Giannetti, which we loved in our youth, and to whose memory we still are constant. Green as emerald was the garb she wore, and the sun loved to shine upon her as she glided from the shadow of the trysting-tree. But then this fairy personage did not tally well with the other figures of the group. We could not conceive her associating familiarly with the gaunt but good-natured Scathelock, and Mutch the miller's son. Summer, too, must pass away from Sherwood as it does from every sublunary scene. The leaves fall—the birds are mute—the grass has withered down—and there is snow lying two feet deep in the forest,—and then, wo is me for poor Marian, shivering in her slight silken kirtle in the midst of a faded bower! So that we were sometimes compelled per-force to change our fancy, metamorphose Marian into a formidable Girzy, and provide her with a suit of linsey-woolsey against the weather, and a pair of pattens big enough to have frightened all the fallow-deer of the forest with their clatter.

Ivanhoe, however, has played the deuce with our ideal creations, and Robin Hood is now fixed to us for ever in the guise of the yeoman Locksley. We do not like him half so well as we did before. He has, in some degree, compromised his character as an outlaw, by entering into an arrangement with him of the Lion-heart, and he now shoots deer under cover of the kingly license. The old warfare between Little John and the Sheriff of Nottingham is over, and the amicable diacylon conceals the last vestige of their feud. Allan-a-Dale has become a gentleman, and Friar Tuck laid down the quarter-staff, if he has not taken up the breviary.

But if any one wants to know bold Robin as he really was, let him straightway possess himself of those two delightful volumes for which we are indebted to Mr Gutch. We have here not only the consecutive series of ballads known as "The Lytell Geste of Robin Hode," but every ballad, tale, and song, relating to the famous outlaw; and the whole are beautifully illustrated. Mr Gutch thoroughly understands the duty of an editor, and has applied himself heart and soul to the task: in consequence, he has given us by far the best collection of English ballads which for years has issued from the press.

We have said that the English ballads, as a whole, are decidedly inferior to the Scottish. They are neither, in their individual kinds, so stirring, so earnest, so plaintive, nor so imaginative, and Chevy Chase is a tame concern when weighed against the Battle of Otterbourne. But many of them are of great merit, and amongst the very best are those which relate to Robin Hood, and the three stout bowmen of the North, Adam Bell, Clym of the Clough, and William of Cloudeslee. Robin has a fair right to be considered the yeoman hero of England, and the representative of what must have been a tolerably large class of persons throughout the wars of the Roses. In his history, we can trace a kind of tacit protest against absolute despotism and feudal oppression. He is the daring freeman of the soil, who will not live under arbitrary law, and who, in consequence, ends by setting all laws whatever at defiance. He is not a thief, but a free-booter, and is entitled to receive from posterity whatever credit may be attachable to such a character. His is, in many respects, a parallel case to that of Rob Roy Macgregor, though there is far more of deep tragedy as well as of patriotism, interwoven with the history of the Highland outlaw. Robin asserts no tangible principles beyond active opposition to the church, and determined hostility to the game-laws. For the first of these tenets Baines would have fallen down and worshipped him: for the second, John Bright would have clothed his whole company gratuitously in drab. He is fond of fighting, and ready to take up the cudgels with any chance customer; but, somehow or other, he has invariably the worst of the encounter. Tinker, beggar-man, tanner, shepherd, and curtail friar, in succession, bring him to his knees, and his life would have been many times a forfeit, but for the timely assistance of his horn, which brought Little John and the rest to the rescue. Guy of Gisborne was, we believe, the only champion whom he slew unaided, and even in that meeting he was placed in sore jeopardy.

"Robin was reachless on a root,
And stumbled at that tide,
And Guy was quick and nimble withall,
And hit him upon the side.

Oh dear Ladye! said Robin Hood,
That art both mother and may,
I think it was never man's destiny
To dye before his day.

Robin thought on our Ladye dear,
And soon leapt up againe,
And straight he came with a backward stroke
And he Sir Guy hath slaine."

But there is a fine jovial rollocking spirit about the outlawed hero of Sherwood, which endears Robin to the popular heart of England: and we firmly believe that Shakspeare, when he went out poaching of a moonlight night, was more actuated by poetical precept and impulse than by any sensual covetise for the venison of old Sir Thomas Lucy.

Many ingenious persons—nay many excellent poets, have in modern times attempted to imitate the ancient Scottish ballad, but in no single case has there been a perfect fac-simile produced. The reason of the failure is obvious. An ingenious person, who is not a poet, could not for the dear life of him construct a ditty which, in order to resemble its original, must embody a strain of music, and a burst of heroic or of plaintive passion. It is not, however, by any means so difficult to imitate the diction: of which we have a notable example in the ballad of "Childe Ether," which is included in several of the collections. "Childe Alcohol," perhaps, would have been the better name, if all the circumstances which we have heard relating to its composition be true; nevertheless it is undeniable that our facetious friends who are chargeable with this literary sin, have succeeded in producing a very passable imitation, and that their phraseology at least is faultless. A poet, again, neither can nor ought to imitate, and when he is writing in earnest the attempt is absolutely hopeless. For every poet has his own style, and his own unmistakeable manner of thought and of expression, which he cannot cast off at will. If he imitates, he ceases for the time to be a poet, degenerates into a rhymster, and his flowers upon close inspection will be found to have been fabricated from muslin.

Very blind indeed must be the man who could mistake "Sir James the Rose" for an ancient Scottish ballad. Michael Bruce, the author, was more than an ingenious person: he was also a poet, and had he lived a little longer, and at a period when simplicity in composition was rated at its true value, he would in all probability have executed something better. But he wanted power, and that pathos which is indispensable for the composition of a perfect ballad. Even Scott, when he attempted too close an imitation, failed. The glorious fragment which we have already quoted, "The Eve of Saint John," "Lochinvar," and others, are not to be considered in the light of imitations, but as pure outbursts of his own high chivalrous and romantic imagination. But the third part of "Thomas the Rhymer" is an adaptation to, or continuation of the ancient fragment, with which, however, in no respect can it possibly compare. Indeed the old ballad stands almost isolated in poetry, for its wild imaginative strain.

"She's mounted on her milk-white steed,
She's ta'en true Thomas up behind;
And aye, whene'er her bridle rung,
The steed flew swifter than the wind.

O they rade on, and further on;
The steed gaed swifter than the wind,
Until they reached a desart wide,
And every land was left behind.

"Light down, light down, now, true Thomas,
And lean your head upon my knee,
Abide and rest a little space,
And I will show you ferlies three.

"O see ye not yon narrow road,
So thick beset with thorns and briers?
That is the path of righteousness
Tho' after it but few inquires.

"And see ye not that braid, braid road,
That lies across the lily leven?
That is the path of wickedness,
Tho' some call it the road to heaven.

"And see ye not that bonny road
That winds about the fernie brae?
That is the road to fair Elf land,
Where thou and I this night maun gae.

"But, Thomas, ye maun hold your tongue,
Whatever ye may hear or see;
For if ye speak word in Elfin land
Ye'll ne'er get back to your ain countrie."

O they rade on and farther on,
And they waded through rivers aboon the knee,
And they saw neither the sun nor moon,
But they heard the roaring of the sea.

It was mirk mirk night, and there was nae stern-light,
And they waded through red blude to the knee,
For a' the blude that's shed on earth
Rins through the springs o' that countrie."

The late ingenious Mr Cromek was not, so far as we know, physically blind, but most assuredly there hung a heavy cloud over his mental light, since he could not discern the burning stamp of original genius in the fragments which were communicated to him by Allan Cunningham, and which he published under the title of "Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song." Poor Allan Cunningham has passed away from amongst us, not unknown indeed, nor unhonoured, but without having received that full meed of praise and fame which was justly his due. For Allan, though a most industrious man, was far too careless of his poetic reputation, and never could be prevailed on to collect together those scattered snatches of song, which he had sown with too liberal a hand in detached and distant places. But the service which he would not render to himself, has been performed by filial piety; and we now congratulate the public on their possessing, in a cheap and elegant form, the works of the most tender and pathetic of the Scottish Minstrels who have arisen since the death of Burns. If this little book does not become a favourite, and if it does not speedily make its way, not only into every library, but into every farm-steading of Scotland—if the poems of Allan Cunningham do not become as familiar to the lips, and as dear to the hearts, of our shepherds and our peasantry, as those of his great predecessor—then we shall be constrained to believe that the age is indeed an iron one, that the heart of our beloved country has at last grown cold, and its impulses less fervid than of yore. It is now nearly thirty years ago—a long, long time to us—since Cromek's collection of Remains was noticed in this Magazine. Cunningham was then in the flush and zenith of his genius, with years, as we had fondly hoped, of fame before him, and all the early difficulties which beset the path of a youthful poet overcome. He was then urged to a diligent cultivation of the glorious talent he possessed, and to a further development of the seeds of poetry which lay within his own bosom, and in the spirit of his native land. And surely had Allan acted thus, and confined himself to the range of literature within which he had few equals and no superior, he would ere now have gained a lofty and imperishable name. But a mistaken ambition diverted him to other tasks. He left the field of song to wander through the forest of romance, and we fear that he lost himself amidst its mazes.

It is upon the present collection of his poems and songs that Cunningham's fame must rest; and small as is the bulk of the volume, we yet do not hesitate to say that it would be difficult to point out another containing more lyrics of exquisite beauty, with fewer palpable blemishes. Cunningham's poetical style is both rare and remarkable. With a singular simplicity of diction, he combines imagery of the highest kind, and a pathos which at once finds its way to the heart of every reader. To many of our friends the following ballad may be familiar; but as a new generation who know less of Allan has arisen since the days of Cromek, we may be excused for transferring once more to our pages a gem of such purity and lustre.

"She's gane to dwall in heaven, my lassie,
She's gane to dwall in heaven;
'Ye're owre pure,' quo' the voice o' God,
'For dwalling out o' heaven!'

O what'll she do in heaven, my lassie?
O what'll she do in heaven?
She'll mix her ain thoughts wi' angel's sangs,
An' make them mair meet for heaven.

She was beloved by a', my lassie,
She was beloved by a';