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swelling at a great national crisis, that it is difficult to say whether the narrative or the emotional element prevails.

It is impossible to suggest a perfectly logical classification of the ballads and songs, or of any other literary works whatever. The following must justify itself simply by its convenience for our purposes:—

1. Legendary ballads and songs-those in which a supernatural element, embodying the superstitions of a less scientific age, comes into play.

2. Social ballads and songs-those to which the social affections or the events of social life furnish a theme.

3. Romantic ballads and songs-those in which the subject is an imaginary, or at least an uncertain event.

4. Historical ballads and songs-those which contain a poetical narrative of, or reference to, some known event of history.

THE BALLADS AND SONGS

OF SCOTLAND.

D

CHAPTER I.

LEGENDARY BALLADS AND SONGS.

"There must thou wake perforce thy Doric quill;
'Tis fancy's land to which thou sett'st thy feet
Where still, 'tis said, the fairy people meet,
Beneath each birken shade, on mead or hill.
There each trim lass, that skins the milky store,
To the swart tribes their creamy bowls allots;
By night they sip it round the cottage door,
While airy minstrels warble jocund notes.
There every herd, by sad experience, knows
How, winged with fate, their elf-shot arrows fly,
When the sick ewe her summer food forgoes,

Or, stretched on earth, the heart-smit heifers lie.

Such airy beings awe the untutored swain :

Nor thou, though learned, his homelier thoughts neglect ;

Let thy sweet Muse the rural faith sustain ;

These are the themes of simple, sure effect,

That add new conquests to her boundless reign,

And fill, with double force, her heart-commanding strain."

COLLINS' Ode on the Superstitions of the Scottish Highlands.

THE poems comprehended under this designation, are those which involve a belief in forms of agency incompatible with the known laws of nature. Such a belief arises spontaneously in any mind unacquainted with the

uniformity of type which modern science has detected in the innumerable varieties of being, and with the uniformity of sequence which we have been taught to trace through all the various processes by which Nature reaches her ends. In order to study the legendary lyrics with profit, we must, therefore, carry ourselves by imagination back into those old times, when the convictions of science found as yet no place in the culture of men,— when no shock was given to ordinary human beliefs by the idea of creatures which violated every principle of anatomical structure, when an extraordinary event, instead of being laboriously referred to some recognized agency of nature, was at once explained as the work of some of those supernatural beings which peopled the fancy of our ancestors.

Most of the superstitious conceptions thus originated, which we come upon in the legendary songs and ballads, have been handed down from an exceedingly remote period, and, in the course of tradition, have gathered numerous features by which their original shape is more or less concealed. In fact, nearly all those superstitions of modern Europe, which have a title to be called popular, on the ground of their acceptance among a people at large, and not merely among isolated individuals or isolated sections of a community, still bear traces of their descent from heathen times. The recent researches of comparative mythology have put into our hands the clue by which we can already track many of the legendary beliefs, of the Aryan nations at least, to their common Eastern home; and in studying the poems which come under review in the present chapter,

several opportunities will occur for observing the various shapes which the same primitive legend has assumed under the various influences to which it has been subjected at the different points where it has been deposited along the stream of Aryan migration.

The most universal agency in modifying Aryan mythology among the Western nations has been the introduction of Christianity. The mass of beliefs and practices which formed the religious faith and worship of the pre-Christian Teutons, in whom we find our ancestry, did not at once yield to the force of Christian teaching. As Roman Christianity became tainted by numerous symbols and festivals of the paganism it supplanted, so the Teutonic tribes, long after their conversion, clung to the old beliefs which in fact entered into all their forms of thought and speech about the world, as well as to the observances which had, in many cases, woven themselves into the habits of their daily lives. The influence, indeed, of the new religion on these Teutonic superstitions was various. Those which were clearly incompatible with essential principles of Christian thought and life, were, of course, ultimately compelled to give way, though the struggle of the Church with even these was protracted longer than might have been anticipated, and isolated remains of heathen cultus may still be discovered by the antiquary, in various retired districts throughout Europe.1 In some

1 See some instances in Sir John Lubbock's "Origin of Civilization," chap. v. But the whole subject of such survivals of an earlier culture in a later has been recently investigated, with great learning, in Tylor's "Primitive Culture," vol. i. chapters iii. and iv.

cases, however, the Church was forced to content itself with a compromise, throwing what is often a very thin veil of Christianity over ideas and practices of Teutonic heathenism. An instance or two of this kind may be worthy of attention, as introducing us to some of the Scottish ballads.

In studying the intellectual progress of modern Europe, we are met by no fact more mournful than the prolonged hold, even over educated minds, of the belief in witches and witchcraft. In its essential nature this savage superstition takes us back to that rudimentary faith in supernatural power, designated by the historians of religion fetichism, which is found among tribes at the lowest stage of civilization.1 Springing from essential tendencies of human thought, it crops out in places which are separated by all the earth's diameter, and distinguished by every variety in the manners of life; while it survives among us still in minds which have yet been scarcely affected by the scientific spirit of modern times. Though the culture of the past three half centuries has taught us to view this faith as wholly alien to Christian civilization, yet even the revolting results which it exercised on judicial practice did not exclude it, till recent times, from the realm of Christian thought. The reason of this is evidently the fact, that it found a point of attachment in a certain cycle of Christian dogma,-the doctrine of a devil, and a world

1 It is just possible that, in Britain, there may have been a slim thread of historical connection between ancient Druidism and modern witchcraft, some of the Druids, whose individual personality has come down to us, having been women. See Burton's "History of Scotland," vol. i. pp. 222–4.

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