creatures.

:

popularity of Richardson's great novel, she says: “I'm clear for burning Sir Charles Grandison by the hands of the common hangman. The girls are all set agog seeking an ideal man, and will have none of God's corrupted I wonder why they wish for perfection for my share I would none on't; it would ruin all my virtue and all my love. Where would be the pleasure of mutual forbearance, of mutual forgiveness?"1 The distinctively Christian virtues, therefore, mould the sentiment of such songs as Lady Nairne's Oh, Weel's me on my ain Man, and give a happy point to a humorous little lyric like that preserved by Herd, My Wife has taen the Gee, in which the surly indignation of the wife dissolves, with amusing rapidity, before the penitence of the goodman.

"When that she heard, she ran, she flang
Her arms about his neck;

And twenty kisses in a crack;
And, poor wee thing! she grat.

"If you'll ne'er do the like again,
But bide at hame wi' me,
I'll lay my life, I'll be the wife
That never taks the gee.'"

Even with the laugh, which cannot be repressed at the poor wife who has to complain that Our Gudeman's an unco Body, there mingles an emotion which is not wholly free from respect.

1 "The Songstresses of Scotland," by Sarah Tytler and J. L. Watson, vol. i. p. 135

"When he comes hame fou at e’en,

He's sic a takin gate aye wi' him,
I sigh and think on what he's been,
I flyte awee, and just forgie him.

"Twa score and ten has cooled his bluid,

And whiles he needs a drop to warm him;
But when he taks 't to do him guid,

He whiles forgets, and taks 't to harm him.

“When twa hae wrought, and twa hae fought
For thretty year sae leal thegither,

A faut or flaw is nought ava',

They may weel gree wi' ane anither."1

The nature of these songs of conjugal love would scarcely be exhibited in full, if we did not briefly refer to those in which that love appears after its office in life may be said to have been fulfilled. From the lady to whom we owe several of our most touching lyrics of domestic life, we have received that song which sounds more like the voice of a spirit already in "the land o' the leal," than of one who is merely "wearin awa'" to its sorrowless bliss. In a less familiar song, The Widow's Lament, by one of our more recent song-writers, Thomas Smibert, there is a wail over the loss of husband and children, which places the reader at once in sympathy with the bereaved heart.

(6 Afore the Lammas tide

Had dun'd the birken tree,

In a' our water side

Nae wife was blessed like me.

1 First printed in the "Book of Scottish Song" (Blackie and Son,

Glasgow, 1843).

A kind gudeman, and twa

Sweet bairns were round me here, But they're a' taen awa'

Sin' the fa' o' the year.

Sair trouble cam our gate,
And made me, when it cam,

A bird without a mate,

A ewe without a lamb.

Our hay was yet to maw,

And our corn was to shear,
When they a' dwined awa'
In the fa' o' the year.

downa look afield,

For aye I trow I see
The form that was a bield

To my wee bairns and me;
But wind, and weet, and snaw,
They never mair can fear,

Sin' they a' got the ca'

In the fa' o' the year.

For whae our wheat will saw,
And whae our sheep will shear,
Sin' my a' gaed awa'

In the fa' o' the year?

"My hearth is growing cauld,
And will be caulder still,
And sair, sair in the fauld

Will be the winter's chill;

For peats were yet to ca',

Our sheep they were to smear,
When my a' passed awa'

In the fa' o' the year.

"I ettle whiles to spin,

But wee, wee patterin feet
Come rinnin out and in,

And then I just maun greet ;

I ken it's fancy a'

And faster rows the tear,
That my a' dwined awa'

In the fa' o' the year.

"Be kind, O Heaven abune,
To ane sae wae and lane,
And tak her hamewards sune

In pity o' her maen.

Lang ere the March winds blaw,

May she, far far frae here,

Meet them a' that's awa',

Sin' the fa' o' the year."

Even the wild life of the Border rievers, with all its savage callousness to the sacredest human affections and rights, does not, as The Lament of the Border Widow

shows, exclude the same wifely sorrow over a husband, though he has met with a well-merited fate from the laws of his country. In the spirit in which the old mythology represents Sigyu, wife of Loki, the mischiefmaker of the gods, holding a cup over her husband to shelter him from the torture to which he was doomedthe incessant dripping of a serpent's venom on his face -in the same spirit this Border monody furnishes a deeply pathetic picture of a widow sitting in the loneliness of death, watching the corpse of her robber-husband gibbeted over the gate of his own tower, while she sewed his winding-sheet; and a natural regret follows her, as we' think of her taking the corpse down and carrying it off on her back, while, staggering under the burden, she "sometimes gaed and sometimes sat," till she reached the grave she had made,

"And happed him wi' the sod sae green."

It cannot, therefore, be matter of surprise that scarcely one, if any, of the Scots songs or ballads pourtrays, except in a spirit of disapproval, that looseness of conjugal relationship which forms an unhappy feature of some communities, where marriage is not founded on the intimate personal acquaintance and fondness resulting from a previous courtship, and where consequently the husband does not necessarily expect affection from his wife, nor the wife fidelity in her husband. Conjugal virtue has, indeed, long formed a prominent trait in the race, of different branches of which the Scottish nation is mainly composed, appearing, as it does, in the domestic purity of the mythical Asgard, which, in its turn, must