1892.] on Tales of the Scottish Peasantry. 497 



few men have known tliem ; and lie lived on terms of friendly inti- 

 macy with his valued Tom Purdies and others, and of close literary 

 confidence with such men as William Laidlaw. The two writers 

 who rank next in the group were, however, peasants born. I have 

 already spoken of James Hogg. Allan Cunningham, born in 1784, 

 was a son of the land-steward on the estate on which Eobert Burns 

 occupied a farm, — a fact which no doubt had its effect in stimulating 

 the poetic impulse that was in him. His " Traditional Tales of the 

 English and Scottish Peasantry" is perhaps the best of the many 

 books which he wrote, and is especially distinguished by the sweet- 

 ness of his style, and by the picturesque traits of old-fashioned 

 country life, and the delightful touches of fresh nature-painting in 

 which it abounds. After Cunningham, comes Campbell of Isla, 

 born in 1822. He was of gentle birth, but understood and sympa- 

 thised with the peasantry. He spoke the Gaelic language, and 

 travelling on foot through the West Highlands, was able to get the 

 people to tell him stories, which he accurately noted down. In his 

 collection, therefore, we get the stories as nearly as possible in the 

 words in which they were told. Then, among lesser writers in the 

 same class, there are, Dougal Graham, the chap-book writer, who 

 has been called the Scottish Kabelais ; Eobert Chambers, whose fame 

 as a publisher has somewhat obscured his well-earned fame as an 

 author ; besides many others, some of them of merely local reputation. 

 Literature takes the life of tradition, and then embalms the dead 

 body. To-day the old stories, which introduce the supernatural, 

 have ceased to be believed or told. But, in their place, there is still 

 to be found a body of genuine peasant- tales which do not tax credulity 

 quite too far. And it is a fact worthy of attention that, though these 

 stories may and do deal in horrors, yet they never descend to the 

 merely " sensational " ; being invariably raised by some touch of 

 fancy, of character-painting, of the picturesque, into the region of 

 poetic fiction. 



In conclusion, what is there in these " old wives' tales " to justify 

 their withdrawal, even for an hour, from the limbo of forgotten 

 things ? They have a place, though it be a very humble one, in the 

 history of the workings of the human mind. They are the mani- 

 festation, in one of its simplest forms, of the literary or art impulse ; 

 and nothing that has been thus generated, and that has stood the 

 test of time as these tales have stood it, can ever, I believe, be 

 unworthy of our study. These simple stories were the outcome of 

 faint stirrings in the human breast of two passions — the Love of Beauty, 

 and the Thirst for Fame. " One touch of Nature makes the whole 

 world kin " ; and the lapse of centuries does not prevent our entering 

 into the feelings of the peasant story-teller. Art is not only a thing 

 of bound volumes and of exhibitions ; and perhaps the Scottish 

 peasant has shown as keen a sense of it — of the story-teller's art, at 

 least — as his mental development and the conditions of his existence 

 would admit. [G. D.] 



