REVIEWS — THE BALLADS OF SCOTLAND. 305 



editor restores to " Gil Morrice." It manifestly requires a bold, yet 

 discriminating hand thus to deal with the favourite versions of a na- 

 tional literature, only secondary in the strong hold which it retains 

 on the affections of the people, to the songs which have been wedded 

 to national airs. But while editorial critics will not be wanting here- 

 after with their conjectural emendations, new casts, and revised recon- 

 structions ; and infallibility is beyond the reach of the shrewdest dili- 

 gence : it will be difficult to surpass the present editor in judicious 

 critical acumen, or the no less indispensable elements of genuine 

 poetic taste and reverential conservatism of the minutest fragment of 

 the true antique. 



His restoration of " Gil Morrice " is a good example of his mode 

 of dealing with a hopelessly "ravelled skene." Eirst, the '' ingenious 

 interpolations" of the contributors to Bishop Percy's "Reliques," — 

 which so roused the ire of old Ritson, — are expunged by wholesale ; 

 and no one can regret the erasure of such spurious antiques as the 

 following : 



" His hair was like the threeds of gold 

 Drawne frae Minerva's loome ; 

 His lipps like roses drapping dew, 

 His breath was a' perfume 1 " 



But besides such manifest interpolations, Mr. Jamieson's version had 

 undergone a readaption to popular taste, by suiting it to the style of 

 an age, prior to 1755 ; and this consisted not in verbal alterations, 

 but in a recasting of the whole. It had been pieced with stanzas 

 from other ballads, and eked out with counterfeits in the worst style 

 of the eighteenth century. The process of its restoration is thus de- 

 scribed by its present editor : " I have taken as a foundation the 

 popular version recovered by Mr. Motherwell, from which many of 

 the artificialities have disappeared. I have weeded from it every 

 stanza which I consider to have been fabricated in the copy of 1755, 

 replacing them, when that was possible, by stanzas from the imper- 

 fect old version printed by Mr. Jamieson ; and I have cancelled the 

 larcenous verses transferred from ' Lady Maisry.' The ballad, thus 

 divested from its gauds, is at all events simple and unexaggerated." 



To weed our ballad literature of all that is spurious, however, needs 

 a singularly cautious and discriminating acumen, when we bear in 

 remembrance the history, for example, of Cromek's adventures in 

 search of Nithsdale and G-alloway song. The author of the newer 



