480 REVIEWS ROMANTIC SCOTTISH BALLADS. 



Chambers selects as typical ? Typical of what ? — of the taste and 

 style of a particular and not very remote age, when a certain class of 

 Scottish ballads were composed and recited ; but not surely typical of 

 all genuine Scottish ballads of all ages. Here is the authentic Scottish 

 lyrical fragment of the thirteenth, or at latest, of the early part of the 

 fourteenth century : 



" When Alexander our king "was dead, 

 That Scotland led in love and lee, 

 Away was sons of ale and bread, 



Of wine and wax, of gaming and glee ; ; 



Our gold was changed into lead. 



Christ, born into Tirgioity, 

 Succour Scotland and remede 



That stat is in perplexity." 



It is not to be doubted that, prior to the eighteenth century, — wheE 

 as we have seen, Scottish editors and collectors led the way in the re- 

 covery of ancient song and ballad literature, both of Scotland and 

 England, — maiiy old songs and ballads were current among the 

 people, which had been handed down orally, from generation to gen- 

 eration, changing and modernising with the familiar characteristics of 

 the age : just as medieval painters and sculptors invariably rendered all 

 ancient and scripture subjects in the costume of their own day. In 

 this way, "faem," "fans," " feather beds," and " cork-heeled shoon," 

 might all find their way into an old ballad, without affording any 

 ground for suspecting it to be a forgery. "When however such poems 

 after passing through the alembic of popular tradition for successive 

 generations, were at length committed to writing, the form they assum- 

 ed depended a good deal on the transcriber. An old dame could be 

 prompted in her recitation where lacunae occurred ; and when she had 

 done her best, the transcriber's work began. Fragmentary songs or 

 ballads were in little esteem from the days of Allan Ramsay to Percy, 

 and their collections only illustrate the process of eking and patch-work 

 everywhere going on. But the original collectors were few, rarely 

 more than one or two to a district. Hence the style which tradition 

 would necessarily give to the oral verse of a locality, was supplemented 

 by the style in which the tinkering of the collected songs and ballads 

 ot the district was carried out, alike as the work of one or two enthu- 

 siastic gleaners, and of the age in which they wrought. Hence, also„ 



