86 
I see my own parish contributed 19s. 4d. But in spite of efforts 
again and again renewed, a century elapsed before there was 
anything of real peace and quiet on the Borders. On every 
opportunity the old spirit broke forth. Thus at the Restoration of 
Charles II., in 1662, we are told the Scots and mosstroopers have 
again revived their old custom of robbing and murdering the 
English, and often had the inhabitants need to say, with the old 
ballad, 
Lord, send us peace into this realm, 
That every man may live on his own. 
It was only by slow degrees that the old roving habits were 
replaced by a more civilized and peaceable condition of affairs, 
and far down into the 18th century we find the traces of the 
predatory mode of life that had so long prevailed. Nicolson, 
writing towards the close of it, finds the last trace in the custom of 
aman and woman stealing away each other—a pleasant form of 
larceny—amid the hot pursuit of friends, and getting married by 
the forger of iron links, whose temple was at Gretna Green: and 
even this species of larceny has now been put down by the hand 
of the law. 
I have thus endeavoured, most imperfectly, I know, to trace 
some of the scenes that are connected with the Borders, and to say 
something of the Ballads in which their later history is enshrined. 
I have brought you through a period when here 
From age to age 
Contending nations strove with mutual rage, 
to a day when we loiter through the district for a summer holiday, 
and all around see signs that now 
Here guardian peace—here smiling culture reigns, 
And endless Plenty clothes the fertile plains. 
Such has been the result of Progress on the Borders. Mr. Ruskin 
remarks somewhere that the scenery most fruitful of literary 
intellect is not the absolutely mountainous nor the perfectly flat : 
it is the mixture of hill and vale, where there is demand at once 
for man’s energy and man’s endurance, and yet room also for ideas 
_ * 
