and Yon Burnside, and Gloomy Winter, and the Minstrel's wailing ditty, and the noble Gleniffer. Oh how they did ring above the rattle of a thousand shuttles! Let me again proclaim the debt we owe to these song spirits, as they walked in melody from loom to loom, ministering to the low-hearted; and when the breast was filled with everything but hope and happiness, let only break out the healthy and vigorous chorus, 'A man's a man for a' that,' and the fagged weaver brightens up. ing influences of these very songs? To us they were all instead of sermons. Had one of us been bold enough to enter a church, he must have been ejected for the sake of decency. His forlorn and curiously patched habiliments would have contested the point of attraction with the ordinary eloquence of that period. Church bells rang not for us. Poets were indeed our priests but for those, the last relics of moral existence would have passed away. Song was the dewdrop which gathered during the long night of despondency, and was sure to glitter in the very first blink of the sun. You might have seen Auld Robin Gray wet the eyes that could be tearless amid cold and hunger and weariness and pain."

Who dare measure the restrain

Those who have mixed much with Scottish society, especially among the middle and working classes, know that Thom's is not an isolated experience,—that, in fact, the higher sentiments by which, among these classes, life is ennobled into something more than a mere gratification of animal cravings, or a monotonous round of insipid tasks, are drawn from the inspirations of popular

song. The people of Scotland have indeed lived in an atmosphere of song; their minds are saturated with its. spirit; their talk is moulded by its language. The national mind has thus become a richly cultivated soil, in which popular poetry strikes its roots deep, and, finding congenial nourishment, produces fresh fruits with ever renewed fertility. The astonishing fertility of the Scottish mind in the production of popular poetry is witnessed, not only by the innumerable names which make up the long roll of Scottish songwriters, but perhaps far more by the royal munificence with which gems of song have been scattered abroad, unclaimed by individuals, to become the common property of the people, like modest wild-flowers which bloom alike for all, for all at least who are sufficiently natural to appreciate their bloom. It is to this poetical fertility of the Scottish mind that we owe also the constant revision through which many of our finest lyrics have passed into the more finished forms in which they are familiar to us at the present day; for numberless conscious and unconscious efforts of unknown lovers of song have been carrying on the process, by which Ramsay and Burns, and Lady Nairne and Joanna Baillie, have entered, like spirits of light, into the genius of old songs which had been blighted by the touch of grosser spirits, and have breathed into them a purer life.

in

It is scarcely possible to suppose that any nation can exhibit a more extensive lyrical taste and lyrical productiveness of few nations can it be said that song fluences their life even to the same extent. The marvellous character of the Scottish mind in this respect has not

failed to attract the attention of one of the wisest students of literature. "We admire the tragedies of the ancient Greeks," said Goethe to Eckermann one day; "but, to take a correct view of the case, we ought rather to admire the period and the nation in which their production was possible, than the individual authors; for though these pieces differ a little from each other, and though one of these poets appears somewhat greater and more finished than the other, still, taking all things together, only one decided character runs through the whole.

"Now, take up Burns. How is he great, except through the circumstance that the whole songs of his predecessors lived in the mouth of the people,—that they were, so to speak, sung at his cradle; that as a boy, he grew up amongst them, and the high excellence of these models so pervaded him, that he had therein a living basis on which he could proceed further? Again, why is he great, but from this, that his own songs at once found susceptible ears amongst his compatriots; that, sung by reapers and sheafbinders, they at once greeted him in the field; and that his boon companions sung them to welcome him at the ale-house? Something was certainly to be done in this way.

"On the other hand, what a pitiful figure is made by us Germans! Of our old songs-no less important than those of Scotland-how many lived among the people in the days of my youth? Herder and his successors first began to collect them and rescue them from oblivion; then they were at least printed in the libraries. Then, more lately, what songs have not

Bürger and Voss composed! Who can say that they are more insignificant or less popular than those of the excellent Burns? But which of them so lives among us that it greets us from the mouth of the people? They are written and printed, and they remain in the libraries, quite in accordance with the general fate of German poets. Of my own songs, how many live? Perhaps one or another of them may be sung by a pretty girl to the piano; but among the people, properly so called, they have no sound. With what sensations must I remember the time when passages from Tasso were sung to me by Italian fishermen !" 1

men.

It is not to be forgotten in estimating the value of these words, so far as they refer to Germany, that, while they come to us through the medium of a German Boswell, they are but the conversational expressions of a cultured poet, who drew his knowledge from comparatively limited intercourse with the mass of his countryBut whether his account of the popular taste for song in Germany be absolutely correct or not, his language indicates the impression produced upon a foreign student by contemplating the extensive diffusion among the Scottish people of the taste for popular poetry and of the faculty for producing it, as the causes to which mainly the astonishing genius of Burns was due. What may be the future of the popular poetry of Scotland, it is difficult and would be unwise to prophesy. There is much, as already hinted, to indicate that the national peculiarities of the Scotch are fading away in the assimilating process carried on by the increasing international

1 Eckermann's "Conversations of Goethe," vol. i. pp. 409, 410.

intercourse of modern times; and the result of this may be, that the difference of dialect will wholly disappear in the literary productions which emanate from different sides of the Tweed. Still, even if this is to be the result of the new influences under which we live, the popular poetry of Scotland need not, and probably will not, cease to be a power in the life of her people.

It has been already remarked that the ballads are fast dying out of the memories of the people, and that the day has long gone by when a genuine ballad could be produced. But the ballads are now more extensively known, and more thoroughly studied, than they were in those old times when they were preserved entirely by traditional memory. They have passed into literature, and become one of the powers from which the literary culture of our time receives its tone. Such may be the fate of all the popular poetry written in a distinctly Scottish language. Even if such should be its fate, however, that is no mean function which it is yet called to perform; and its future influence upon literature may well be cherished, if we may judge from the beneficence of its power in the past.

The place taken by the early songs and ballads of the Teutonic nations in the revival of a more natural literature during the past hundred years has become a commonplace of literary history. It is not yet quite a century, since among these nations the memory revived of that early popular literature which is now being studied with enthusiasm by numerous critical historians. Undoubtedly this revival of memory was due to the deeper and more loving look with which