46

66

"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,1 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, 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 medieval 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.

"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,

chivalrously sets out to rid the land of its ravages. On coming within sight of the monster, he challenges her to quit the land, or he will send a shaft at her head from his "arblast bow."

666

"O out of my stythe I winna rise,

(And it is not for the awe o' thee,)
Till Kempion, the Kingis son,

Cum to the crag, and thrice kiss me.'
"He has louted him o'er the dizzy crag,
And gien the monster kisses ane;
Awa she gaed, and again she cam,

The fieryest beast that ever was seen.”

Twice again she returns to announce the same condition, on which alone she will quit her place, receiving, the second time, two kisses, the third time, three; and at the three kisses the spell breaks, she is restored to her own shape :

"The loveliest ladye e'er could be!"

""O was it warwolf in the wood?

Or was it mermaid in the sea?

Or was it man or vile woman,

My ain true love, that mishaped thee?'

“It wasna warwolf in the wood,

Nor was it mermaid in the sea;
But it was my wicked stepmother,
And wae and weary may she be !'

"O, a heavier weird shall light her on,
Than ever fell on vile woman;

Her hair shall grow rough, and her teeth grow lang,
And on her four feet shall she gang.

None shall take pity her upon

In Wormeswood aye shall she be won;
And relieved shall she never be,
Till St. Mungo come over the sea.'
"And sighing said that weary wight,

'I doubt that day I'll never see.'"1

More definitely eery still is the emotion excited by those ballads which refer to a return from the dead. Death is, under any circumstances, an irresistible stimulus of eery feeling, from the consciousness that it brings us to a limit of the natural world, and the irrepressible surmise, that there the beings of a preternatural world may possibly disclose themselves to mortal ken. The hope,-the belief,-is thus originated, that the soul, which has passed beyond the limits of earthly life, may yet not only take an interest in the fate of former friends, but even reveal itself to their sorrowing, longing eyes; and this belief finds expression, not only in the crude ghost stories of every region, but in numerous fictions throughout the prose and poetical literature of various countries.2 Of these the ballad poetry of Scotland furnishes not a few examples. The ballads of James Herries and Sir Roland have already

1 The concluding lines, in the measure of the metrical romances, are exceedingly interesting and valuable, since they can scarcely be explained except as a corrupted snatch of one of the romances, and, therefore, as exhibiting, in its arrested progress, the breaking down of one of those old poems of the high-born into a ballad of the people. See Scott's "Border Minstrelsy," vol. iii. p. 230.

2 The investigation of these legends has become a favourite inquiry in the Aminism of recent archæologists; and the reader will find an extraordinary collection of interesting information on the subject in Tylor's "Primitive Culture."