476 REVIEWS ROMANTIC SCOTTISH BALLADS. 



Songs," of which his biographer, writing in 1763, says " this poetical 

 compend was so well relished that it hath undergone a multitude of 

 impressions ; and the demand for it is as great as ever." Of this, the 

 twenty-fifth edition, issued from the Edinburgh press in 1797, and 

 others in siibsequent years, give unmistakeable evidence. Meanwhile, 

 on the frail chances of the famous but long unheeded Bannatyne 

 Manuscript in the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh, and the more 

 voluminous M.S. volumes of Maitland of Lethington, in the Pepysian 

 Library at Oxford, depended the recovery of many curious and early 

 Scottish poems, of which no other copies are known to have existed. 

 But the appearance of "Watson's Collection, in 1706, is an index of 

 that changed feeling which produced, at a later date, Allan Ramsay's 

 volume of Scottish Songs in 1719 ; his "Evergreen, being a collection 

 of Scots Poems wrote by .the Ingenious before 1600 ;" and his "Tea 

 Table Miscellany," a collection of songs, Scottish and English ; issued 

 in 1724 and subsequent years. In the wake of all these, appeared in 

 England, Wharton's " History of English Poetry," in its three original 

 quartos, between 1778 and 1781 ; and Percy's celebrated " Reliques 

 of Ancient English Poetry," made their first debut, with timidly apo- 

 logetic introduction to "a polished age," in 1765. 



The critical collections of Ritson, Ellis, Herd, Jamieson, and even 

 of Scott, belong to a different class, and to a later period, when the 

 fruits of the earlier movement were being reaped in an entirely new 

 school of original and genuine poetry ; as well as in a reverential care 

 for the fragments of antique song and ballad. In one characteristic, 

 especially, the most noticeable of the earlier collections differ from 

 those of this latter class, viz : in their notorious patch-work complete- 

 ness. The poems are not genuine antique torsos, but " restorations," 

 produced with little or no hint of the modern restorer's hand, except- 

 ing such as is unmistakeably present to the instructed ear of a more 

 critical age. It seemed to the collectors of the early part of the 

 eighteenth century, as incumbent a duty to patch and tinker the frag- 

 mentary relic of song and ballad that oral tradition had preserved, as 

 to attempt their recovery. Hence we must be slow to reject a whole 

 ballad as a modern compilation, because of modern phrases, ideas, and 

 even whole stanzas, surreptitiously patched into its genuine warp and 

 woof. It is important also to bear in remembrance that the era of 

 literary forgery, — embracing as it does the Rowley Poems of the gifted 

 Chatterton, the "Ossian" of Macpherson, and the "Shakspeare Ma- 



