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made their names a household word. All these we owe to the 
Border and its Ballads—to those old songs which have been given 
to us direct from a people’s heart—and to the long and weary 
strifes and struggles in the district, to which that heart belonged. Is 
there any other locality that can boast of a more valuable, a more 
characteristic gift to literature? And amid the conventionalism and 
sickly sentimentality of much that is written inthis r9thcentury ; amid 
artificial poetry and sensational novels, we may still turn with 
refreshment to the quaint simplicity and native vigour of our old 
Minstrelsy, and find there something to stir, without corrupting, our 
imagination, something to ennoble the character, and to help to 
raise a race of Borderers as stout of hand and as strong of heart as 
those who have gone before us—just as amid the breezy hills and 
dales and streams from which it sprang, we may gather fresh 
strength and new vigour for the work of life. 
