varieties of this feeling, as they are represented in different ballads of Scotland.

As expressive of that vague eeriness without positive fear, which forms the faintest stage of the feeling, The Wee Wee Man1 may be cited,-a ballad in which we seem to hear an indistinct echo, dying in some far-off nook among the Aryan settlements, of the primeval fancy which is repeated in the ancient Greek legends of Philytas, who had to wear lead on his shoes lest the wind should blow him away, and of Archestratus, who weighed only an obolus,2 as well as in the numerous modern versions of the German Däumling (Thumbling), our own Tom Thumb.3 The hero of this ballad, though his legs were "scant a shathmont's length," resembled the dwarfs of most legendary stories in the superhuman power with which he was endowed.

"He has tane up a meikle stane,

And flang 't as far as I could see;
Ein thouch I had been Wallace wicht,
I dought na lift it to my knee."

Like Tom Thumb, moreover, this mysterious little man was on terms of familiar intercourse with the fairy world. For the minstrel and he, riding on together, light at last upon a "bonny green," such as the fairies are known to choose for their revels; and there comes forth "a lady

1 First given to the world, I believe, in Herd's "Scottish Songs." 2 See Grimm's "Kinder und Hausmärchen," vol. iii. p. 71.

3 It is a curious circumstance, that Sir Walter Scott found The Wee Wee Man introduced in one version of The Young Tamlane-a ballad the legend of which, as we shall afterwards find, is of the same origin with that of Thumbling ("Border Minstrelsy," vol. ii. p. 334).

sheen" with four-and-twenty others in her train, all clad in "glistening green," the orthodox hue of fairy costume. On passed, with a pleasing wonder, the cheery procession, till they reached "a bonny ha," the roof of which was of "the beaten gowd," and the floor of crystal. Here burst upon the view a scene of elfin revelry; but it is well known that the fairies shrink from exposing their festivities to mortal eye, and that, whenever they become aware of mortal presence, they vanish from sight in some mysterious way. This was the result upon the advent of the mortal minstrel with his unearthly little guide.

"When we cam there, wi' wee wee knichts

Were ladies dancing, jimp and sma';

But in the twinkling of an eie

As expressing eeriness of a similar mild form, The Elfin Knight2 may be adduced. Opening in a manner that recalls the ballad of Lady Isabel and the ElfKnight mentioned above, it introduces us to a knight of the fairy world, who, by some preternatural motion, is brought to a maiden's side by her mere wish.

"The Elfin Knight sits on yon hill;

He blaws his horn baith loud and shrill.

1 The dénouement in Motherwell's version is different, and connects The Wee Wee Man perhaps more definitely with the legend of Thumbling, and with that of Thomlin or Tamlane, which is to be afterwards described.

"There were pipers playing in every neuk,

And ladies dancing, jimp and sma';

And aye the owreturn o' their tune

Was, 'Our wee wee man has been lang awa!'

'Child's "English and Scottish Ballads," vol. i. pp. 129 and 277.

"He blaws it east, he blaws it west,

He blaws it where he liketh best.

"I wish that horn were in my kist,
Yea, and that Knight in my arms neist.'

'She had no sooner these words said,

Than the Knight came to her bed."

The maiden, however, is considered by the knight
"ower young" to be married at once; and there arises,
accordingly, a lively bandying of impossible demands,
the inability to perform which results in the retirement
of the knight discomfited, the ballad concluding with a
verse which sounds like the chorus of some old song:-
"My plaid awa, my plaid awa,

And owre the hills and far awa,
And far awa to Norowa;

My plaid shall not be blown awa."

In the ballad just cited there is much to remind one of the sportive, half-meaningless rhymes of the nursery. The Earl of Mar's Daughter, again, is a pleasing play of fancy, which readily recalls the myth of Eros and Psyche, as well as the burden of many a nursery tale. The heroine of this ballad, amusing herself one day "below a green aik tree," is attracted by "a sprightly doo," which she induces to come down to her under the promise of "a cage o' guid red gowd." On being taken home to her bower, the dove turns out to be a beautiful prince who has been transformed into this shape; and the prettiness of the story is enhanced by the fact that

1 Buchan's "Ancient Ballads and Songs of the North of Scotland," vol. i. p. 49. One cannot but join in Professor Child's regret, that this ballad has not been preserved in an older form.

the transformation is ascribed, not to the malice of a stepdame or witch, but to the kindly magic of the prince's own mother, whose ambition has been to render him thus a more potent charm to maidens.

"My mither lives in foreign isles,

She has nae mair but me;

She is a queen o' wealth and state,
And birth and high degree.
"Likewise well skilled in magic spells,
As ye may plainly see;

And she transformed me to yon shape,
To charm such maids as thee.

"I am a doo the live lang day,

A sprightly youth at night;
This aye gars me appear mair fair
In a fair maiden's sight."

Of a more exciting nature are the ballads which relate deliverances from the enchantments of superhuman power, such as form the theme of popular fictions in all lands. In the ballad which has just been. described, as well as in several others already noticed, there is a reference to such enchantments; but the ballads of which I now speak, are those in which, not the enchantment itself, but the deliverance from it, constitutes the plot of the story. Scottish literature possesses at least one fine specimen of these ballads in Kempion,1 or Kemp Owyne, as it is called in Buchan's

1 First published by Scott from Mrs. Brown's MS. in "Border Minstrelsy," vol. iii. p. 230. Kempion resembles a very popular Border ballad, The Laidley Worm of Spindleston-heugh, ascribed, either in whole or in part, to the Rev. Mr. Lamb, of Norham. The reader may find some interest in comparing Mr. Morris' tale, The Lady of the Land, in "The Earthly Paradise," in which the would-be deliverer, feebler in nerve than Kempion, quails at the sight of the lips he is required to kiss.

and Motherwell's versions. Scott has referred to the frequency of similar fictions in mediæval romance. Norse literature is also full of them: in fact, Mr. Child sees in the word Kemp (Champion) a monument of the relation of our ballads to the Koempeviser. Mr. Motherwell holds that the name Owyne connects this ballad with the Celtic hero Ewain or Owain ap Urien, King of Strathclyde; while the legend of enchantment and deliverance will probably recall to many some of the fascinating and luxuriant fancies in the tales of

"the golden prime

Of good Haroun Alraschid."

Kempion opens with the utterance against a maiden of a doom which transforms her into a dragon's shape.

66 6

Cum heir, cum heir, ye freely feed,

And lay your head low on my knee
The heaviest weird I will you read,
That ever was read to gay ladye.

"O meikle dolour sall ye dree,

And aye the salt seas o'er ye swim;
And far mair dolour sall ye dree

On Estmere crags, when ye them climb.

"I weird ye to a fiery beast,

And relieved sall ye never be,

Till Kempion, the Kingis son,

Cum to the crag, and thrice kiss thee.'

The event, however, which the sorceress has set as a presumed impossibility in the way of her victim's disenchantment, actually takes place. Kempion hears of the dragon's presence, and, with his brother Segramour,