manners of the time, mixing observation with shrewd judgment and sense; but feeling nothing of nature, and quite incapable of touching the heart by pathos, or filling the soul with imagery.

Towards the close of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century there was a scholarly band of men in Edinburgh, the centre of whom was Dr Archibald Pitcairn. They were accomplished Latin versifiers, on the model chiefly of Horace. One of the most distinguished of them was Sir William Scott of Thirlestane (born about 1670, died 1725). Twentyfour of his poems appear in Selecta Poemata (Edin., 1727). It is difficult to determine how far the scenery of the Border, familiar to his ancestors and himself, affected the poetry of this descendant of an old and storied line; but in the poems which he has addressed to his friend Sir William Bennet of Grubbet, an estate up near the Cheviots, Scott shows marked feeling for rural objects, aspects of nature, and country life.

Thus:

"Nunquam carebunt fructibus arbores ;

Fæcundet imber lætificans ferens

Messes, et hortorum colores

Vivificans viridesque silvas."

One likes also his fine penetrative and pithy tribute to
Allan Ramsay :-

"Qui Scotis numeros suos, novoque
Priscam restituit vigore linguam."

Sir William Scott married in 1699 the Mistress of Napier, heiress of the Napier peerage, and from this marriage is descended the present Lord Napier and Ettrick.

244

CHAPTER VII.

BORDER POETRY-EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

THE Earl of Stirling, Drummond of Hawthornden, Aytoun of Kinaldie, died before the middle of the seventeenth century. From that date down to the first quarter of the eighteenth there appeared no Scottish poet of any public note. In the Lowland valleys and glens there had been heard during that period, and even long before it, scattered strains of ballad and song, many of them full of fine, simple, and truthful feeling. These were caught up and sung in the home circles and at the firesides of the Lowland farmhouses and shepherds' cots. But there was, as yet, no attempt at any single great poem. The spirit that was in the older ballads and songs had not yet been concentrated and distilled into one pure continuous melody.

James Watson, in his Collection of Scots Poems Ancient and Modern, published in three parts from 1706 to 1711, had drawn attention to some of those floating songs and ballads. And the Evergreen and Tea-Table Miscellany of Allan Ramsay—both published in 1724— further enhanced the interest in this line of literature.

James

It was diligently cultivated by subsequent collectors. Percy's Reliques, which referred to both sides of the Border, in 1765 opened up the widest field of ballad literature as yet disclosed. Percy was followed by David Herd, with his Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs, in 1769. Then there came Evans' Old Ballads, 1777; Pinkerton's Scottish Tragic Ballads, 1781, and his Select Scottish Ballads, 1783. Ritson began to publish books of songs in 1783, and continued down to 1795. Johnson, in The Scots' Musical Museum, 1787, greatly aided the work; Burns contributing new songs. J. G. Dalzell, in 1801, gave Scottish Poems of the Sixteenth Century. Walter Scott, in 1802, gave the first two volumes of the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. The third volume appeared in 1803. This was a work second in importance and immediate influence only to that of Percy himself. In 1806, Robert Jamieson gave to the world his Popular Ballads and Songs, and pointed to the large Scandinavian element in our ballad literature. Since then we find on the roll of distinguished collectors and editors, Finlay, David Laing, C. K. Sharpe, Maidment, Utterson, Buchan, Allan Cunningham, Kinloch, Motherwell, R. Chambers, Peter Cunningham, Aytoun, Chappell, Child, &c.

Dr Samuel Johnson, the best representative of the stilted artificialism of his time, sneered, as was to be expected, at the labours of Percy. But the resuscitated ballads and songs were true to natural feeling and to the primary and permanent human emotions; and, though they were but the material of a literature, they formed the well-spring of a new and free literary de

velopment, which, while it yields nothing in the power of imaginative creation to the old, and nothing really in point of true artistic perfection, far surpasses it in the freshness and the living power which truthful delineation of the facts of man's spiritual nature, and of the aspects of the world around him, alone can inspire.

The

But it was an original work which, in the early part of last century, first disclosed to the world the wealth of beauty in Scottish scenery, and the naturalness, simplicity, and pathos that lay close at hand in Scottish rural life. This was The Gentle Shepherd, published in 1725. feeling for the natural scenery of Scotland had been growing in susceptible hearts in this first quarter of the century. James Thomson, the son of the minister of Ednam, whose boyhood had been passed at Southdean, high up among the wild and striking hills which slope down to the picturesque and beautifully wooded valley of the Jed, carried with him to England haunting impressions of winter storms which had swept the Carter Fell and passed over rugged Ruberslaw. And, a year after The Gentle Shepherd, there appeared Winter, a poem, followed in 1727 by Summer. Thomson dared to be true to the face of nature, and to make the delineation of it the all-sufficient object of poetry. And it enhances the merit of the poet that in this, a new form of poetic art, he was thoroughly successful, and influenced the eighteenth-century literature of Britain, indeed all British literature since his time. But The Gentle Shepherd was more immediately powerful in Scotland. Ramsay's poem drew attention to the Lowland and pastoral scenery of Scotland, and hence naturally to the vales of the Tweed,

the Teviot, and the Yarrow.

It thus became the fashion

of the versifiers of the time to choose for the scenery and the subjects of their songs the pastoral localities and legendary incidents of those streams. This tendency has continued down to our own time; and, looking back over the hundred and sixty-eight years that have elapsed since Ramsay evoked the full power of Scottish song, and gave it its pastoral impulse, we find a series of poets more or less inspired by the Tweed, the Yarrow, the Ettrick, and the Teviot, such as no other locality of Scotland can parallel in numbers or surpass in pathos, tenderness, and truthfulness. Besides Ramsay himself, we have his friend Hamilton of Bangour, Robert Crawford, Logan, Leyden, Hogg, and Scott; and, if not in the same rank with these, yet we have true singers in James Nicol, Thomas Smibert, Henry Scott Riddell, and several others. The power, too, of the scenery, and the poetic strains. which it has inspired, are seen in men who were neither natives of nor resident in the district, as Robert Fergusson, Langhorne, and Wordsworth. Besides all these, there has been in the district itself many a local poet, unknown to public fame, who nevertheless felt the power of the scenery and the charm and humour of the simple manners of the people, and who was a source of pleasure, cheerfulness, and refinement in his own small circle. Alas, that so few of these singers have left behind them even the memory of their names! But, looking at the whole, we may well ask, Did ever single Scottish or other stream quicken in the hearts of men such a flow of song as that which has been inspired by the Tweed and its tributary waters?