benefits of Scots law, such as they were, became restricted to its own inhabitants. English novelists and jesters have made wild work with the law, by which, as they misapprehend, a man can be wedded without meaning it; one American story-teller is so little up-to-date as to marry his eloping hero and heroine at Gretna in our time. The gist of the matter is that while England favoured the masculine deceiver, fixing the ceremony before noon, it is said, to make sure of the bridegroom’s sobriety, the more chivalrous Scots law provided that any ceremony should be held valid by which a man persuaded a woman that he was taking her to wife. No ceremony indeed was needed, if the parties lived by habit and repute as man and wife. The plot of Colonel Lockhart’s Mine is Thine, one of the most amusing novels of our time, turns on a noted case in which an entry in a family Bible was taken as a sufficient proof of marriage. It is only gay Lotharios who might find this easy coupling a fetter; though in the next generation, especially if it be careless to treasure family Bibles, there may arise work for lawyers, a work of charity when the average income of the Scottish Bar is perhaps five pounds Scots per annum.
Gretna Green, of course, lies on the western highroad from England, beside which the Caledonian Railway route from Carlisle enters Scotland, soon turning off into a part of it comparatively sheltered from invasion by the Solway Firth, whose rapid ebb and flow make a type of many a Gretna love story. This side too, has often rung with the passage of armed men. At Burgh-on-Sands, in sight of the Scottish Border, died Edward I., bidding his bones be wrapped in a bull’s hide and carried as bugbear standard against those obstinate rebels. The rout of Solway Moss made James V. turn his face to the wall, his heart breaking with the cry, “It came with a lass and it will go with a lass!” And the Esk of the Solway was seldom “swollen sae red and sae deep” as to daunt hardy lads from the north who once and again
Swam ower to fell English ground,
And danced themselves dry to the pibroch’s sound.
These immigrants, unless they found six feet of English ground for a grave, seldom failed to go “back again,” perhaps with an English host at their heels. Prince Charlie’s army passed this way on its retreat from Derby. But this side of the Borderland is less well illustrated by stricken fields and sturdy sieges. It has, indeed, no lack of misty romance of its own, such as an American writer dares to bring into the light of common day by adding a sequel to Lady Heron’s ballad, in which the fair Ellen is made to nurse a secret grudge at last confessed: she could not get over, even on any plea of poetic license, that rash assertion:
There are maidens in Scotland more lovely by far
Who would gladly be bride to the young Lochinvar!
“Fosters, Fenwicks, and Musgraves,” how they rode and they ran on those hills and leas in days unkind to “a laggard in love and a dastard in war”! These names belong to the English side, as does Grahame in part. Elliot and Armstrong, Pringle and Rutherford, Ker and Home, Douglas, Murray, and Scott, are Scottish Border clans, who kept much together as in the Highlands. “Is there nae kind Christian wull gie me a night’s lodging?” begged a tramp on the Borders, and had for rough answer, “Nae Christians here; we’re a’ Hopes and Johnstones!” a jest transmuted farther north into the terms of a black Mackintosh and red Macgregors.
The first name of fame passed on the Caledonian line is Ecclefechan, birthplace of Thomas Carlyle, now a prophet even in his own country, but it is recorded how a devout American pilgrim of earlier days found no responsive warmth in the minds of old neighbours. “Tam Carlyle—ay, there was Tam!” admitted an interrogated native. “He went tae London; they tell me he writes books. But there’s his brither Jeems—he was the mahn o’ that family. He drove mair pigs into Ecclefechan market than ony ither farmer in the parish!” Tom had carried his pigs to a better than any Dumfriesshire market. If we turned west by the Glasgow and South-Western Railway, we should soon come among the shrines of Burns and the monuments of Wallace. But let us rather take the central route, on which flourishes a greener memory.
The “Waverley” route from Carlisle, a central one between those East and West Coast lines, so distinguishes itself as passing through the cream of the country associated with Sir Walter Scott, its first stage being the wilds of Liddesdale, where he spent seven holiday seasons collecting the Border Minstrelsy. This district, where “every field has its battle and every rivulet its song,” can boast of many singers. From the days of Thomas the Rhymer comes down its long succession of ballad-makers who “saved others’ names but left their own unsung.” At Ednam was born James Thomson, bard of The Seasons and of “Rule, Britannia,” who surely deserves a less prosaic monument than here recalls him. From Ednam, too, came Henry Lyte, a name not so familiar, but how many millions know his hymn “Abide with me”! Some of Horatius Bonar’s hymns were written during his ministry at Kelso. About Denholm were the “Scenes of Infancy” of John Leyden, poet and scholar, cut off untimely. Near his humble home, now turned into a public library, is the lordly house of Minto, one of whose daughters wrote the “Flowers of the Forest.” Thomas Pringle, the South African poet, was born at Blakelaw, near Yetholm, the Border seat of gipsy kings. Home, the author of Douglas, is said to have come from Ancrum, which can more certainly claim Dr. William Buchan of Domestic Medicine renown. Riddell, author of “Scotland Yet,” began life as a Teviot shepherd. If we may touch on living names, was not Mr. Andrew Lang born among the “Soutars of Selkirk,” who has gone so far ultra crepidam? But indeed a whole page might be filled with a bare catalogue of the bards of Tweed and Teviot.
The genius loci, greatest of all, while born in Edinburgh, sprang from a Border family of “Scotland’s gentler blood.” The cradle of his race was in Upper Teviotdale, near Hawick, that thriving “Glasgow of the Borders,” among whose busy mills the old Douglas Tower still stands as an hotel, and rites older than Christian Scotland are cherished at its time-honoured Common Riding. Not far off are Harden, home of Wat Scott the reiver, and Branxholme, that after being repeatedly burned by the English, bears an inscription of its rebuilding by a Sir