296 REVIEWS — THE BALLADS OF SCOTLAND. 



rarely without the greater wrong of editorial liberties with such ver- 

 sions, in the inevitable cobbling which such a process involves, — that 

 those ancient local adaptations in reality corrupt the text. 



Prom his earliest years familiar with the traditionary poetry of his 

 native country, and admitting its vigorous snatches to a stronger hold 

 alike on his memory and his feelings than the epigramatic couplets of 

 the poets of Queen Anne, or the most favourite lines of Horace : the 

 author of the " Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers," and of some among 

 the most piquant of our modern comic ballads, possesses many 

 special qualifications for the task he has undertaken. Still further, 

 he says, " I may add, that the idea of collecting and restoring, in so 

 far as that was possible, the scattered fragments of the Scottish 

 ballad poetry, in a complete form, has long been present in my mind, 

 and has at various times, when leisure permitted, occupied much of 

 my attention." "With the natural indignation alike of a true poet 

 and an enthusiastic literary antiquary. Professor Aytoun gives ex- 

 pression, in his introduction, to the disgust with which he has observed 

 that much of the genuine floating minstrelsy of elder centuries, 

 which had been gathered in various localities by diligent and faithful 

 hands, but with little or no method or arrangement, " was being 

 quietly pilfered for the purposes of transmogrification, and that 

 various old favourites had been furbished, dressed up, and exhibited 

 to the public, with applause, as novelties ; and knowing well the 

 value of much that remained," he adds, "I was not without appre- 

 hension that in the course of time the whole stock would be absorb- 

 ed, to reappear in modern glitter and resonance, just as if a hidden 

 treasure of unicorns, bonnet pieces, and Jacobuses, were to be 

 discovered by a sly appropriator, and by him to be recast as medals 

 bearing his own name and legend." 



Those ancient ballads have gone through a curious process from 

 first to last. Published originally in venerable Homeric style by 

 recitation of the author himself, they have been subjected to such 

 unintentional variations as are the inevitable consequence of oral 

 tradition, and to this — more than to purposed change, — may be 

 ascribed much even of that local variation, which makes the Aber- 

 deenshire, the Ayrshire, and the Border versions of the same ballad 

 so diverse. Again, the most popular ballads transmitted orally from 

 generation to generation, partook inevitably of the changing fashions 

 of the age, until we find the old song of the Percy and the Douglas, 



