482 REVIEWS — ROMANTIC SCOTTISH BALLADS, 



Miscellany, we have neitlier print nor manuscript of tbem before tlie 

 reign of George III. They are not in the style of old literature. They 

 contain no references to old literature. As little does old literature 

 contain any references to them. They wholly escaped the collecting 

 diligence of Bannatyne. James Watson, who published a collection 

 of Scottish poetry in 1706-1711, wholly overlooks them. Eamsay, 

 as we see, caught up only one. Even Herd, in 1769, only gathered 

 a few fragments of some of these poems. It was reserved for Sir 

 "Walter Scott and Kobert Jamieson, at the beginning of the nineteenth 

 century, to obtain copies of the great bulk of these poems — that is, 

 the ballads over and above the few published by Percy — from A laby 

 — a certain ' Mrs. Brown of Falkland,' who seems to have been the 

 wife of the Rev. Andrew Brown, minister of that parish in Fife, — is 

 known to have been the daughter of Professor Thomas Gordon, of 

 King's College, Aberdeen, — and is stated to have derived her stores 

 of legendary lore from the memory of her aunt, a Mrs. Farquhar, the 

 wife of a small proprietor in Braemar, who had spent the best part of 

 her life among flocks and herds, but lived latterly in Aberdeen. At 

 the suggestion of Mr. William Tytler, a son of Mrs. Brown wrote 

 down a parcel of the ballads which her aunt had heard in her youth 

 from the recitation of nurses and old women. Such were the external 

 circumstances, none of them giving the least support to the assumed 

 antiquity of the pieces, but rather exciting some suspicion to the 

 contrary effect." 



On the supposition of those ballads being genuine, and chiefly re- 

 covered from the oral conservation of one or two isolated Scottisli 

 districts, could any account of such recovery present a more natural 

 aspect. Instead of a successful forger flooding the eagerly credulous 

 collectors with the coveted ballad-prizes : Ramsay gets hold of one ,- 

 Herd, following towards the close of the century, gathers portions of 

 several ; and then the full harvest of them, as of most other classes of 

 Scottish Ballads, is reaped by Jamieson and Scott. Meanwhile Mrs. 

 Brown, of whom we have a very credible and likely account, had been 

 diligently doing her best and without some such collectors of legendary 

 lore it is difficult to see how traditionary songs and ballads were to be 

 recovered at all. 



That Mrs. Brown of Falkland had as genuine a love for old ballad 

 literature as either Ramsay or Percy we do not doubt ; and that when 

 a line or even a stanza was wanting, she hesitated just as little as they 



